I wonder if Mauricio Kagel knew Flanders and Swann’s “I’m a Gnu”? I only raise the possibility because the seventh section of Kantrimiusik is anchored around the same melodic hook that feeds this pun-tastic novelty ditty. Coincidence? Or do certain musical intervals attract comedic-minded musos?

Kantrimiusik (1975) is “funny” Kagel for sure, albeit not quite as sharp as, for instance, Die Stücke der Windrose. It developed out of Kagel’s idea that what passes for folk music in the “entertainment industry”, and in tourist associations oversentimentalising their local charms, is expressed through “fake music”. To satirise this tendency Kagel has created a one-size-fits-all pan-national faux-pastoralism in an attempt to “foster apocryphal musical art”. You’d better hold your sides, because the gags come thick and fast.

A joke is even embedded inside Kagel’s instrumental line-up. As two trumpets, clarinet and tuba plod like a German oompah band, a banjo twangs yee-hah Country and Western vamps – just what country is this folk band supposed to be from? Other instruments get marooned mid-Atlantic. The violin references bluegrass fiddling and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, while the pianist starts playing barrelhouse boogie-woogie for no proper reason.

Twee recordings of country idyll ambience add a supremely silly layer of picture-postcard artifice, while cod-folksongs are drolly delivered by Tunstall, Bickley and Belk. Among all these heavily nuanced parodies, Kagel does lose edge from his normally potent presence: but if the world’s folk music becomes a homogenised whole, what dangers lurk in the fact that we won’t know ourselves? The subtext, as always, is serious.