The first rule of MANTRA is “You do not talk about MANTRA.” The second rule is that if you find yourself unable to stop thinking about MANTRA, you talk around it, circle it, cultivate the soil from which it grows. That is how this album begins, not with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s looming monolith, but with John Liberatore’s Sedgeflowers, a choice that feels both mischievous and deeply principled. Pianists Ryan McCullough and Andrew Zhou do not kick down the door. They plant something. And what emerges is an astonishingly inventive and coherent program that understands that radicalism is a spirited little ouroboros just waiting for a stage on which to be heard.

Liberatore’s music blossoms almost immediately, unfurling from its opening gestures with a tactile generosity. Motifs sprout, dance, and scatter seeds wherever they go, each one a record of what came before and a wager on what might still take root. As these cells overlap and undergo profound metamorphosis, the piano becomes an archaeological site. Fragments of bygone vocabularies surface, collide, and re-inter themselves, leaving behind playful gestures that sprint up and down the keyboard like delighted trespassers. They score the earth, opening furrows that resemble a crisscrossed field of morose crops waiting to be reaped. By the final movement, the music feels uncannily alive, a high-speed game of table tennis played by miniature ghosts, all kinetic energy and ricocheting echoes. It is delicate, forthright, and unabashedly joyful. Between movements, two brief interludes appear like a gardener’s secret weapon, sparkling applications of fertilizer that ensure the whole thing keeps growing.

The title Sedgeflowers refers to an invasive grass-weed that appears in a 14th-century poem encountered by Liberatore, a nuisance transfigured into something vivid and beautiful. That alchemical reversal becomes the guiding ethos of the entire project, which germinated during the claustrophobic early days of the pandemic. From this soil grew the RAGE: Vented project, rooted in one of Beethoven’s most irascible curios, the 1795 Rage Over a Lost Penny, Vented in a Caprice. A handful of composers were invited to respond, not with reverence but with friction. Because the world itself was vented, McCullough and Zhou recorded separately, stitching their performances together afterward, a method that turns isolation into an aesthetic principle rather than a limitation.

Yi-wei Angus Lee’s Rage Over Lost Time wanders into this space like a dreamer with a toolkit. Extended techniques on the piano strings summon overtones, growls, and subterranean murmurs, turning the instrument inside out. The effect feels cinematic and uncanny, as if one were strolling through a Brothers Quay film in which dilapidated objects twitch into life, stubbornly refusing to be obsolete. When fragments of Beethoven finally appear on the keys, they feel less like quotations than like memories storming the holiday dinner table, gnawing on whatever leftover turkey bones they can get their claws on.

Memory also drives Dante de Silva’s Two Sedated to Rage, a hall of mirrors in which Beethoven brushes up against the Aria from J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1. These echoes of echoes fold inward, each reflection already filtered through time, history, and longing. What emerges is a truth glimpsed only with closed eyes, a lullaby for noteheads that know they are already ghosts.

Aida Shirazi’s triptych, RAGE: Screamed, RAGE: Stolen, RAGE: Silenced, takes a darker turn. Tape and putty mute the piano strings into a rain-like hush, a sound world built in solidarity with voices cut short by the garrote of the global political machine. Individual tones surface as cryptic hints of Beethoven, never coalescing into full phrases. Allegiance to the canon is not rejected so much as incinerated, reduced to ash alongside the bodies and stories the world prefers to bury in doom-scroll denial.

If Shirazi burns the archive, LJ White listens to its aftershocks. Rage is the Bodyguard of Sadness frames social isolationism, before and after COVID, as a series of subterranean distillations. Improvisationally inflected ruminations bubble up from below, guarding grief by standing watch, arms crossed, daring anyone to look away.

Andrew Zhou’s own Con variazioni refuses to sit still long enough to be categorized. It is a minefield of interruptions, quotations, and excitations, a piece that never settles into a single groove because it does not believe in contrite comforts. Instead, it tickles the underbellies of its inspirations until they sneeze in unpredictable succession, each eruption more delightfully infected than the last. Bombast gives way to self-deprecation, bravado undercut by a well-timed wink. Acupuncture needles find their way into unsuspecting muscles tattooed in staves and key signatures, revealing that they have always shared a circulatory system, whether they liked it or not.

Christopher Castro’s Beethausenstro-Castockhoven wears its joke proudly. The portmanteau (of the composer’s name along with that of Beethoven and Stockhausen) announces the mashup aesthetic. Still, the music goes further, gleefully knocking Stockhausen’s funny bone and sending his intergalactic pronouncements wobbling. The addition of percussion foreshadows much to come with a tongue-in-cheek vitality that feels more like affectionate sabotage than parody.

Laura Cetilia’s sense of missing leans into resonance. Pennies woven between the piano strings create gong-like sonorities that shimmer and hover. Built from rhythmic motifs drawn from Beethoven, the piece constructs its cellular language one utterance at a time, sounding almost electronic in its transformations. These metallic imprints become inner gardens, places where loss is not filled but cultivated.

Christopher Stark’s Foreword functions as both overture and prophecy. Digital augmentations and piano preparations stretch time sideways, offering a comprehensive foray into what makes 20th-century clocks tick. Voice-like tonal waves breathe alongside watery submersions and cinematic expanses, each pursued by its own shadow. Its sense of eternity is not grandiose but intimate, phenomenally beautiful in its restraint.

Eventually, of course, the first rule breaks down. We have to talk about MANTRA. Stockhausen’s colossal work occupies the album’s second disc like a gravitational field. In his liner notes, McCullough describes the composer as a maverick whose ideas sometimes refused to cohere, standing apart across the variegated chasm of their own century. As Stockhausen pivoted from post-war recalibration to anti-minimalism in the 1970s, he embraced tensions as fetishes, bringing entire musical space-time continuums into relief.

Welcoming MANTRA under their fingers and into their hearts, McCullough and Zhou activate a joyful confluence of practical ingenuity and creative commitment. The opening woodblock and piano footsteps usher the listener into a sound world that feels both familiar and alien. Everyday materials are subjected to extraordinary transformations through preparations, electronics, crotales, shortwave radio, and ring modulators. The latter, powered by McCullough’s own software patch, hum with a bespoke intensity. Unlike Stockhausen’s earlier graphic experiments, MANTRA is meticulously notated (even so, it leaves vast room for imagination). Thirteen variations unfold fractally between an introduction and a postlude, accumulating over more than seventy minutes into a self-styled galactic theater.

Sine wave generators lend a timbral sorcery, while the piece’s wave-like architecture crests and recedes in dramatic confluences of means and message. Percussion and electronics create textural contrasts so vivid they feel almost edible. One can nearly taste them, as if ears had sprouted tongues of their own. Modulated vocal expectorations add splashes of color, reminding us that sound is always a corporeal inflection. MANTRA, for all its reputation, proves remarkably hospitable. It allows listeners to feel whatever they feel without insisting on enlightenment or withholding pleasure. There is no comfort, but neither is there punishment. As modern music goes, it goes down like a spoonful of sugar, possibly laced with caffeine, definitely capable of keeping you up all night.

So yes, we talked about MANTRA. We broke the rule. But like all good rules in art, it turns out to be a koan rather than a commandment. By the end of sedgeflowers/MANTRA, silence feels louder, pennies feel heavier, weeds feel wiser, and rage feels oddly generative. If this is what happens when you vent, imagine what might grow if you finally let yourself listen.