Album: John Cage, The Works for Percussion (2 Mode)

It's boom time for Cage fans – barely a month goes by without another album confirming his status as surely the most underrated composer of the 20th century.

This second volume of his percussion music focuses on early works such as the hugely influential Third Construction (1941), a monumental piece incorporating instruments such as the Peruvian quijada, Mexican teponaxtle and Indian cricket callers. Elsewhere, the second, very slow movement of Quartet (1935) uses the long delay times of bells and gongs to impose meditative calm, while in Living Room Music (1940), an actual room provides the sound sources so inventively mined here by the brilliant Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion.