Had Edgard Varèse been born a minimalist and lived in this century, his music may well have sounded a little like Christopher Cerrone’s Don’t Look Down. Written for prepared piano and percussion quartet, this energetic three-movement work springs to life with an infectious groove built on a rhythmic foundation of interlocking repeating patterns that could easily have been distilled from a funky James Brown song. Polyrhythmic and polymetric patterns also punctuate the final movement, ‘Caton Flats’, its title drawing inspiration from the sound of heavy construction work outside Cerrone’s Brooklyn apartment when he was composing the piece. Surely Varèse would have approved.

Performed with clarity and precision by pianist Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion, Don’t Look Down was written during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, and has been described by the composer as reflecting the strangeness and instability of that time. In fact, uncanny notions of strangeness and familiarity appear throughout Cerrone’s oeuvre, and one of his music’s undoubted strengths lies in its ability to place commonplace elements in unexpected and unfamiliar settings.

Not all of his music is rhythmically driven, either. Don’t Look Down’s second movement conjures up an ambient-style soundscape via layers of bowed vibraphone, soft tremolandos on low marimba, shimmering cymbals and floating notes on harmonica and bottle-tops; the effect is rather like observing a vast space from inside an enormous echo chamber. Similar means are used to create the opposite impression in A Natural History of Vacant Lots for percussion quartet and electronics, where tiny sonic particles are magnified through sustained, resonating pitches and granulating sounds in the tape part. The most recent work on the album, Ode to Joy, synthesises both rhythmic and ambient aspects to powerful effect.

Cerrone’s pulsing rhythms offer more subtle and muted support in the song-cycle Goldbeater’s Skin for mezzo-soprano and percussion quartet, especially during the settings of GC Waldrep’s dreamlike, memory-saturated poems. It is sung with poise and control by Elspeth Davis, and Cerrone’s decision to reduce the vocal line to a limited gamut of pitches adds to the music’s imagistic qualities. The impression is not so much of Varèse but of brief echoes of Knoxville: Summer of 1915 wafting through the air in a 21st-century reincarnation of Samuel Barber’s classic song-cycle.