condition (record/cover): NM / NM Gatefold sleeve. Edgard Varèse may have died in 1965, but his music keeps detonating in the present tense. This Decca LP collecting Arcana, Intégrales, and Ionisation captures the Franco-American visionary at his most explosive, three works that collectively demolished nineteenth-century assumptions about what music could contain.

Ionisation (1929-1931) remains the cornerstone: the first Western concert work for percussion ensemble alone, thirteen players unleashing sirens, anvils, lion's roars, sounds that concert halls had never dignified with aesthetic attention. John Cage heard this and understood that all sound was available; Frank Zappa heard it and decided to become a composer. The piece still sounds like the future, which tells you something about how slowly concert culture metabolizes genuine revolution.

Intégrales and Arcana add winds, brass, the conventional orchestra's muscle, but Varèse treats these instruments as percussion by other means. Melody exists only in fragments, harmony serves rhythm, and rhythm serves something beyond itself: pure sonic energy, what Varèse called "organized sound." The Decca recording captures the violence and the precision, the sense that every explosion is calculated to the microsecond. Essential listening, full stop, no qualifications necessary.