Stretch Your Ears: John Cage

A number of the compositions on The Works for Piano 4 by John Cage, performed by Margaret Leng Tan (Mode, distributed by Harmonia Mundi), were presumed to be lost until their discovery in an old box at the offices of Cage's publishers in 1993. It was quite a find, as the sheaf of papers – works that the composer, who died in 1992, had either refrained from publishing or simply forgotten about – included some of his most tantalising early scores, written in the 1940s for dance collaborations with the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Throughout the excellent recording, one hears intriguing evidence of Cage's formative work with different variations of the "prepared piano" and experiments with percussion, jazz syncopation, Indian time-cycles and various Oriental and even Native American motifs.

The album begins with the terrifically energetic and uplifting "Triple-Paced", created for the first collaborative recital of solo dances and music by Cunningham and Cage in New York in 1944. There are two versions of the piece, each singular enough to count as a separate composition. The first, divided into three brief mini-movements with a combined time of three minutes, is described by Leng Tan as "a conventional keyboard piece laced with glissandos played on the keys and on the strings"; in the second, written for prepared piano, cloth placed between the strings to dampen them produces a familiar Cagean gamelan-percussion effect.

Succeeding pieces are even more revelatory. "Totem Ancestor", written for the same Cunningham performance, uses what Leng Tan calls "a simple bolt and weather stripping preparation of 11 notes" to create a proto-minimalist series of Oriental-sounding percussive patterns, while "Ad Lib" and "Jazz Study" – dance pieces from 1943 and 1942 respectively – reveal Cage's rather eccentric take on jazz. Elements of blues, boogie woogie, ragtime and what sounds like a paraphrase of Ellington and Tizol's "Caravan" jostle for precedence.

Music written for two films, "Music for Marcel Duchamp" (1947, the Cage-scored segment from Dreams That Money Can Buy), and "Works of Calder" (1949-50, this recording including the original narration by Burgess Meredith and percussion interlude by Cage himself), completes the album, together with the 18-minute 1989 composition, "One", written especially for Margaret Leng Tan, and performed on three pianos simultaneously.

Echoes of John Cage and Morton Feldman can be heard throughout the extraordinary album Aether by the Australian trio the Necks (ReR) which, like the Leng Tan, was released towards the end of last year. Over a span of 63 minutes, a series of oblique chords and shimmering harmonics interrupts the presiding silence to create subtle shifts of light and colour in one's mind. Part chill-out, part designer-accompaniment (or alternative) to drug-induced trance, it's fantastic; guaranteed luxe, calme et volupté with every play. Use caution when driving, however: when they played a segment on Late Junction recently, I missed my motorway exit.