One thing’s for sure, the last person to take any interest in recordings of music by John Cage was John Cage. Sound, the great man posited, was a phenomenon that not only lived and breathed but needed to be experienced as such. Recording falsified the moment, he thought, reducing active listening to a constant state of rewind; the fetish of anticipating moments imprisoned in time.

The New York-based Mode label, founded with a mission to document Cage’s music, has always dealt even-handedly with this paradox. Mode records with pristine depth as a matter of pride, a strategy that bypasses the customary heart-searching about recorded sound and turns attention back on to the sonic object itself. Cage’s late-period ‘number’ pieces – Five, Seven (both 1988) and Thirteen (1992), all here for the hearing – are indeed sonic objects that need to be viewed/heard as objectively as possible.

Essential Music realise Five, originally for wind quintet, by blowing across bottles, an approach that Cage, doubtful at first, grew to appreciate. Operating within ‘time brackets’ (cues suggesting when players might like to begin and end their notes), Cage’s randomly lined-up parts cook up a pea-souper of pitches that drift in and out of alignment. Seven and Thirteen return Essential Music to conventional instrumental means, the sonic pay-off, though, being remarkably consistent. Seven’s equal-tempered piano lurks provocatively around the weathered, foggy tuning inflections of the wind and strings; the piano’s harmonies want to lead, an instinct denied them by the remainder of the ensemble.

Third Coast Percussion’s disc finds Cage, as far back as 1935, starting to think about issues of appropriate sound production. He left the scoring of Quartet open because he ‘had no idea what it would sound like’. This was the period when Cage plundered junkyards for boomy metallic hubcaps and the like, but TCP offer a realisation for ‘proper’ percussion that charts the intricate wisdoms of Cage’s interlaced patterns. Also included are the three seminal Construction pieces, never sounding so gnarly on disc as here. But Living Room Music, performed on the support beams, walls and ceilings of a house owned by architect Bruce Goff, and involving a Gertrude Stein rap, is the real coup de théâtre.