Earle Brown - Folio And Four Systems (2006)

John Zorn's Tzadik label seems like an appropriate home for the music of contemporary classical composer Earle Brown, given Zorn and Brown's penchant for avant-garde aesthetics that recall Schoenberg, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman. Tzadik's FOLIO AND FOUR SYSTEMS brings together a sampling of Brown's work that relies largely on the minimalist gesture. Scored for piano and orchestra, FOLIO disrupts patches of silence with tinkling piano, swaths of strings, and tense, often unsettling slices of noise. The disc comes recommended to fans of work by the likes of Cage and Morton Feldman.