Henri Pousseur

The Belgian avant-garde composer Henri Pousseur, who has died aged 79, possessed an extraordinarily complex but undogmatically creative mind. Highly regarded in his own country and widely acknowledged in the Netherlands and Germany, he was less well known in France and hardly at all in Britain, with two notable exceptions.

In 1978, he accepted a major commission from the newly formed electro-acoustic vocal quartet Electric Phoenix. The resulting half-hour marathon, Tales and Songs from the Bible of Hell, would shape the group's technology and aesthetics for years to come. From 2004, he worked with the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University, north London, to develop a digitised version of Scambi (Exchanges), an unorthodox "open form" tape-music composition that he had constructed as early as 1957. Guardian