Timber

Michael Gordon will forever be associated with Bang on a Can, the revolutionary composers' collective he helped found. But in Timber, an hour-long investigation of primal rhythms and overtones, Gordon instructs the members of Mantra Percussion to bang on a plank—or more precisely, six wooden two-by-fours, cut to varying lengths, suspended over sawhorses and amplified. As a show of complexity and intensity disguised as simplicity, this is pretty hard to beat—no pun intended.