Heiner Goebbels’s title might be recondite, though as a ‘performative installation’, first staged in Luxembourg in 2007, Stifters Dinge preaches its aesthetic sermon straightforwardly enough. Nevertheless, Wolfgang Sandner’s booklet-notes might go too far in declaring so decisively that something conceived to be seen as well as heard doesn’t actually need to be seen for its essence to come across.

Exactly what Stifters Dinge – ‘Stifter’s Things’ – are becomes clear in the fifth section, where an extract from a text by the 19th-century German writer Adalbert Stifter paints a vivid picture of a wintry landscape made disturbing by the presence of mysterious sounds: shards of ice rustling, leafless branches cracking. Though this text appears only in German in the booklet, Bill Paterson’s reading of an English translation is easy to follow and the sounds in the background – the installation includes five pianos operated mechanically – serve to enhance the atmosphere of unease and disorientation already present in the words.

These ‘things’ radiate outwards into 11 other sections; while these are superficially diverse, both in their (occasional) texts and their sounds, they combine to project a homily on the risks of disaffection and the need for reconciliation that takes account of the human instincts that can generate ritualistic folk-chanting (with vaguely consonant support) as well as the less comforting kind of post-tonal mechanisms concretely set out in the final section.

Headed ‘Exhibition of Objects’, this is allocated precisely 4'33". A non-silent tribute to John Cage? The prevailing image of nature as often menacingly indifferent, which humans imitate at their peril, is hardly Cageian and Goebbels also avoids the arch-experimentalist’s extremes: repetitions never become oppressive, the various representations of Stifter’s mysterious natural sounds are never too harsh or too attenuated. Purely as sound, Stifters Dinge seems more than a little underwhelming. Maybe adding the visual dimension would make all the difference?