The theme of this year’s concerts at Kings Place is “Earth Unwrapped – Sirens for a Wounded Planet”, but the work with which the Sacconi Quartet opened the season was more concerned with unearthly matters. Terry Riley’s Sun Rings was first performed in 2002 by the Kronos Quartet, with whom Riley has collaborated for more than 40 years. It was commissioned by Nasa to mark 25 years of flights by its Voyager probes and makes use of the archive of recordings made on the missions, whether interplanetary whistles, chirps and static, or messages from Nasa itself.

Riley used these sounds as the starting point for his 10-movement suite, not only to provide an aural backdrop to the live amplified string quartet, but also to shape the melodic material that the instruments play. Though he will forever be linked with Steve Reich and Philip Glass as one of the pioneers of minimalism in the late 1960s and 70s, Riley long ago moved away from process-driven music to incorporate a much richer palette of sound sources, but in Sun Rings that palette sometimes seems too rich. A choir is added to some movements, and the string players generate more electronic sounds by moving their hands over motion sensors, while the quartet veers between forthright, scherzo-like writing and wispy, etiolated textures.

Even at the time of the first performance the cluttered result must have felt somewhat dated, and its use of electronics rather cliched. More than 20 years on it all seems positively quaint, and the well-meaning message of the work, “One Earth, One People One Love” (a line borrowed from Alice Walker), which is rammed home by the chorus in the final movement, comes over as too simplistic in today’s world. The Sacconi had clearly worked hard with the Festival Voices and Brett Cox’s electronics to disentangle what must be a complex work to coordinate, though in a score that allows the performers a certain amount of choice, the 90-minute result seemed just too long.