Album: Earle Brown, Synergy (Hat [now] Art)

Brown, though never as celebrated as his pals Cage and Feldman, produced some of the more enjoyably questing systems music of the last century.

The differing versions of "Event: Synergy II" performed here by the Ensemble Avantgarde reflect the looseness of systems determining pitch, metre etc, though the palette of woodwind and percussion ensures a certain similarity. Here and on "Windsor Jambs" and "Tracking Pierrot", the mood is restive, inquisitive, yet never wilfully antagonistic: like his peers, Brown was heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism, but in his case the mobiles of Alexander Calder were equally as important as the flowing lines of Jackson Pollock.

DOWNLOAD THIS Event: Synergy II; Tracking Pierrot; Windsor Jambs