There are people I respect who seem convinced that the belligerent crossover of Michael Gordon and his pals from New York's Bang on a Can Festival represents the future of contemporary music. Previous examples of Gordon's own mechanised minimalism have enjoyed wide exposure. There was the strangely haunting Industry which lent its name to Sony Classical's first Bang on a Can collection (2/96 - nla), an unconventional display piece for electronically treated cello taking a simple Schnittke-like chordal sequence and brutalising it via an 'industrial' process. Or you might remember the album-length Trance (Argo, 2/97 - nla), rather less compelling to these ageing ears. More recently, the existence of Cantaloupe Music, essentially another 'own label' venture, should ensure the longer term availability of the brand and save it from falling between the cracks of corporate indifference.

Gordon's Decasia began life as the audio component of a multimedia event staged in Basle as part of an audacious music festival presided over by Matthias Bamert. There were more conventional premières on offer, including new music from Mark-Anthony Turnage, but Gordon's pulsing soundscape demanded a suspension of normal narrative expectations and more besides - I understand there were no seats! Since the score was designed to accompany synchronised projections of cinematic images from the pre-sound era, variously streaked and disrupted by chemical decay, I can only assume that its ominous Glenn Branca-ish tone was crucial in lending some sort of emotional coherence and sense of direction to the proceedings. Until now, the project's final destination had seemed to be Bill Morrison's experimental film of the same name. Decontextualised as it is here, its music sounds as thin as Philip Glass is wont to do when divorced from the frame, though, if you respond to Glass, why not experience Gordon's more grindingly avant-gardiste variety of torpor? There may be some sort of point being made here about the remorselessness of time through the slow tread of the sound and the time-imperilled nature of the visuals. Unfortunately, you won't get it from listening to an 'environmental symphony with projections' without the projections. Or at least I didn't. Perhaps narcotics would help.

Is this the art of the future or an opportunistic rehash of background music? Decasia certainly has no truck with the musical conventions of the past. Gone also is anything so helpfully retro as a programme note. For more info, one is directed to the label's website, so perhaps it will have been updated by the time this review reaches you. No technical complaints otherwise and artwork is predictably cutting edge.