In the late 30s American avant-garde composer and enfant terrible John Cage was commissioned to write a score by the choreographer Syvilla Fort for Bacchanale, a short ballet with an “African inflection.” Realizing the stage where the ballet would be performed was too small for instruments and dancer, Cage lit upon the invention for which he is most famous: a piano “prepared” with nails, screws, bolts, rubber, wool, plastic, bamboo, and other materials placed between strings that could function as “the equivalent of an entire percussion orchestra.” The enterprising pianist Betrand Chamayou and his friend the dancer-choreographer Élodie Sicard gathered together 11 other Cage pieces for a show they toured before laying down the album. Even without the visuals, these electrifying miniatures are by turns thrilling, powerful, eerie, and moving. The pianos—four of them, differently prepared to suit the individual pieces—really do sound like an ensemble of diverse instruments with startingly, weirdly wonderful timbres reminiscent of Indonesian Gamelan music (a favorite of the composer), and they are spectacularly played and recorded so as to suggest the illusion of a soundstage. If you have a taste for the far out, and a sense of adventure, I cannot urge you too strongly enough—buy this album!