‘Where Stupa introduces polytemporality in the metaphysical and chronological sense, with all their playful capacity for harmony, Gangsa addresses the listener’s time consciousness itself by opening up the compositional process to the phenomenological experience of sound and tempo.’ Chris Brown – what sort of name is that for a composer? – is professor of music at Mills College in Oakland, California, and thinks nothing of issuing such statements as a guide to how these three pieces for percussion and live electronics might operate.

Are you still there? I hope so because, when it comes to that troubled relationship between ‘academic’ music and the hope-over-experience of Joe Public for music that satisfies the ache for old-school melody – for the sort of composer who doesn’t need to be cushioned by academia to write music no one wants to hear – Chris Brown is a telling case study.

The name ‘Chris Brown’ might not resonate with the bold double-barrelled conviction of a Mark-Anthony Turnage, nor have a cheeky, transcendent ‘grave’ accent like Thomas Adès. He can’t even claim Karl Jenkins’s endearing good looks; indeed you may be thinking he has no profile at all which, as it happens, is why Chris Brown’s music is so inspiring and lithe of concept. He’s not a ‘career’ composer. Some composers use academia as an excuse to coast; Chris Brown has clearly had time to think about sound.

As I listen to Stupa, his 2007 piece for vibraphone, piano and computer, and marvel at Brown using his computer set-up to creep between and inside the vibrating echoes of vibraphone and piano hits, snatching at sounds to sample and drizzle back over their source, his deep listening and flair for sonic texture rings true. Gangsa (2010), for percussion ensemble and live computer processing, binges on the ritual of overlaying deceptively transparent rhythmic and melodic cycles with internally incompatible mathematical permutations that snap the regularity with metallic, brutal force.

Iceberg, from 1985, is more pitch-based, equally fascinating and rigorous. And I urge you to go buy – but not too many of you, or Chris Brown may make a name for himself.