Death. The final frontier. Composers have not been scared to confront it (in their music at least). From Mahler to Wagner, from Mozart to Fauré, they have conjured up visions of the beyond, and the results are anything but morbid. The special, death-haunted radiance of the "farewell" movement from Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde is a fine example, as is Mozart's Requiem – and they're among the works to be celebrated at an intriguing musical deathfest this weekend.

But it's the very last concert in Death: Festival for the Living, at London's Southbank Centre, that has got me really excited. It will feature Petra Jean Phillipson playing her 2011 album Notes on Death. It's music that does something similar to what Wagner operas achieve, creating images of terrifying darkness that are transcended by the time you've got to the end of the whole quasi-operatic experience.

The album starts with unearthly grumblings and preternatural sounds from the deep that, if played loud enough, will make your entire house, not to mention your body, vibrate. This astonishing tuba-filled track is called Underworld Tubeophany, and Phillipson's voice eventually appears as an ethereal spectre above the primordial soundscape just as the tuba texture becomes an unstable, bubbling lava.

Dark? You bet. Gothically bleak? For sure. But it's also strangely uplifting. And that's just the opening salvo in an album full of emotional extremes. Underworld Tubeophany is the kind of single-minded sonic exploration that Xenakis, Stockhausen or Diamanda Galas would have been proud of. In the rest of Notes on Death, Phillipson finds things that shimmer in the dark; by the end, you're consoled with visions of serenity and calm. It's a work that puts me in mind of what Mahler and Mozart and all those death-haunted classical composers discovered: that it's only by confronting and accepting the inevitable that we can be at peace with ourselves. Not bad for an album that starts with low-flying tubas.