New York’s Bang On A Can and the London-based Icebreaker are both composer-performer co-operatives specialising in post-Minimalist and Post-Modernist music informed with rock sensibilities, so it was only fitting they should come together when Michael Gordon, a founder of BOAC, wrote Trance for an expanded version of Icebreaker. The original 1995 recording for Argo has now been remixed by Icebreaker’s director, James Poke, for this reissue on BOAC’s own label, with additional parts overdubbed by James Woodrow (electric guitar) and Poke himself (keyboards).

Any modern major city inflicts information overload on the ear, and New York creates one of the busiest, most varied aural environments imaginable. It truly is the city that never sleeps, and where the car-horns and emergency sirens never stop. Gordon, living in its midst, with the subway crossing the Williamsburg Bridge outside, the phone and the fax going off inside and the radio, TV and computer on, observes that ‘in this cacophony of world noise the parameters of composing have changed… [it’s] like being able to hear all of the music that’s going on everywhere in the world, in your head, at the same time’.

And that’s pretty much what the six-movement Trance is about. Built up from small, agitated figures which clash, collide and (sometimes) coincide, this is a trance that relates to the city- dweller’s survival technique of switching to automatic pilot to plough through the noise and crowds and aggravation rather than the spaced-out pseudo-religious state of airheads. Never comfortable music, it shamanistically ‘dresses up’ to mimic and thus partially neutralise the stresses and anxieties of contemporary urban life and, as in the second and fourth sections, Trances 2 and 4, sometimes becomes genuinely mesmeric.