Charles Amirkhanian (b1945), composer, percussionist, record producer (not least of early discs by Antheil and Nancarrow, whose music Amirkhanian championed) and music festival director, is a key figure in progressive American music. His work has appeared on a number of discs, including two – from CRI and Starkland – devoted wholly to him. The four works included on New World’s two-disc set, however, give the broadest, most engaging perspective on his creativity. Pianola (Pas de mains) is a set of 10 electroacoustic studies (1997-2000) centred around pianola and piano-roll recordings of music by Stravinsky (snatches of Petrushka), Hindemith, Grainger, Honegger and Nancarrow, among others. Individual movements focus specifically, sometimes punningly, for example ‘Tochastic Music’ (Xenakis meets Ernst Toch), ‘Antheil Swoon’ and ‘A Rimsky Business’, in which Korsakov’s bee tackles Herculean tasks. The concluding ‘Kiki’s Keys’ piles up quotes and allusions in a joyful mash-up that would have delighted Ives.

Im Frühling (1989-90) is a sound collage, assembled from natural sounds and then synthesised electronically into what annotator Kyle Gann (himself a noted composer) terms ‘a tone poem in reverse’, where transformed sounds are then set in counterpoint with their source material. Son of Metropolis San Francisco (1997), a reduced version of a much longer electroacoustic work from 1985 86, combines natural sounds – mating elephant seals, not least – with human material from the Pacific region. A homage to his adopted home city, there are allusions to the musics of Lou Harrison, Terry Riley and La Monte Young in the later stages.

The title-track, Loudspeakers (1988 90), is a ‘text-sound’ work, constructed not from notes and pitches of the chromatic or any other scale but from human speech. A portrait and homage in seven panels to the iconic composer Morton Feldman (1926 87), it is assembled with great verve, and as a soundscape it is very entertaining, but is it music? Musical processes are clearly deployed in the construction, as can be heard by following the text, which is treated no worse than in many an opera or oratorio, and the ultimate result is, in my view, musical. Feldman-like, the suite is called Loudspeakers because that is what this music is intended to be played on. An ear-opening release.