I suspect economics was the reason why Australian composer Anthony Pateras – contemplating this five-CD pull-together of his collected works – decided to go with a rather more modest offering than those detailed, wordy booklets that tend to accompany box-sets. Too much modern composition asks to be heard in conjunction with illustrative programme-notes; Pateras, though, is about listening now, thinking later.

In 2006, Pateras’s Chromatophore was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, giddy mainstream recognition for a composer who also works as an improviser, presumably playing to tiny audiences of dedicated followers. But the genius thing about Pateras is that there’s no particular aural distinction between his composed and improvised work. If titles like Chromatophore (not included here) and Crystalline, Architexture and Hypnogogics (all here) put one in mind of a certain streamlined, classic Xenakis/Messiaen/early Ligeti-type modernist mindset, that’s fine. Pateras shares with those antecedents a need to grapple with material; to scrape away layers of obsolete, obvious meaning; to say something about sound that’s relevant to now.

Which, paradoxically, has clearly meant putting distance between himself and those inspirational forefathers. The five CDs are categorised by generic type: chamber and orchestral; prepared piano; pipe organ and electronics; piano; percussion. The prepared piano works, Chasms (2007) and Delirioso (2012), run dangerously close to evoking Cage’s base prepared piano sound – a percussion orchestra with overtones (literally) of the East. But there’s an obsessive itch here that parks the Cage comparison satisfactorily in the past. Pateras uses ostinatos, yes, but without a hint of whimsy or particularly needing to ground the music in harmonic fundamentals; here lines are compulsively repeated, re-examined, re-ordered, emphasis put in a different places. This music is high-energy, high-velocity, shrill, uncaged.

Pateras’s percussion music, too, refuses to do the obvious. I find these percussion pieces – Refractions (2008) especially – lovely, packed with melodic inference. Immediata (2010) is essentially a violin concerto, where some conventional narrative devices move centre stage. But Pateras creates narrative out of sound, rather than forcing his sounds into well-trodden narrative pathways.