Terry Jennings, John Cage, John Tilbury, Sebastian Lexer

Long-awaited gem featuring John Tilbury performing five solo piano compositions by little-recorded Fluxus minimalist Terry Jennings (1940-1981), followed by a forty-minute realization of John Cage's Electronic Music for Piano with Sebastian Lexer on electronics. Recorded in London, November 2007 and September 2009.

Tilbury - best known for his membership in AMM and renowned for recordings of Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Morton Feldman, Howard Skempton and Christian Wolff - brings his unique sensibility to Jennings's compositions: Piano Piece 1958, Winter Sun, For Christine Jennings, Winter Trees, Piano Piece 1960. Jennings - often cited with Terry Riley and La Monte Young as true precursor of minimalism - created music with little repetition but kernels that appear and iterate. "More of an antecedent to Young's 'The Well-Tuned Piano' than subsequent Riley," as one reviewer notes.

The Cage realization is remarkable. Lexer randomly placed microphones and pick-ups within the piano according to star charts, treating their output via his piano+ software. "Nothing seems to be lost in Tilbury and Lexer's wonderful, original realisation," writes Michael Pisaro. "Sounds and silences appear and disappear like natural facts, without any longing of the one to become the other."

Philip Clark in The Wire captures the revolutionary nature of the recording: "The recording melts Tilbury's playing towards silence in an authentic expression of the Cageian spirit, but then something truly remarkable - near the end, the silence captured during the performance is intercut with the absolute silence of blank disc space. The recording takes you completely outside the performance space, and into different colours of silence."

One reviewer suggests: "Don't make my mistake and yank up the volume to appreciate softs that are softer than soft; the recording levels are awesomely (uniquely?) wide and what came next dealt me an ear-splitting shock." Music that is full of jokes and seriousness, but above all beautiful. A disc we'll be talking about for years.