In the tradition of the Bang On A Can All-Stars album, “Industry” (Sony Classical, 2/96), the 20 members of Alarm Will Sound, recent recipients of John Adams’s Son of Chamber Symphony, here gain the accolade of a major record company showcase. And with it comes the opportunity to break through to the mainstream.

Whether or not you warm to the notion that a species of hard minimalist “crossover” represents the future for Western Art Music, the ensemble’s musicianship is not in doubt. And this concept album skilfully bridges or subverts the gap between pop’s circular, non-developing structures based on sound and technology and the classical world’s older, intellectual tradition encouraged by the possibilities of notation. Both sides are shown to have experimented with rhythmic discontinuity, with the player piano pieces of Conlon Nancarrow providing one connecting thread. Yvar Mikhashoff’s Nancarrow transcriptions have been championed before by Ensemble Modern (RCA, 11/93) but the final track of Player Piano Study 3a (as arranged by Derek Bermel) is new to me. Deranged boogie-woogie and a tour de force of rhythmic displacement, it sounds almost impossible to play. Movements from Benedict Mason’s Animals and the Origins of Dance are sprinkled liberally throughout. The composer writes: “Each short aphoristic section is a highly characterised dance movement of metrophonic chaopoly drawing on soundbites from the magical muses and magnificent menageries of South of the Tropic of Cancer.” You have been warned.

Though I would not like to have to explain why, the scintillating chunk of Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto is for me by some distance the “best” music on the disc, making Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare sound positively leaden by comparison. The fashionable shards of adulterated early music also seem likely to pall. Only you can decide whether the lack of substantial dynamic variation between items is a strength and a unifying factor or a weakness, pointing up the aesthetic limitations of the project. To experience Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum in this kick-ass context – it is dispatched at some speed – may or may not incense orthodox Birtwistle fans but the band is self-evidently hot and the sound immediate.