Cage After Cage is a solo percussion disc on which Matthias Kaul plays six works by John Cage, from strictly timed improvisation to the fully written 27'10.554". Silence runs through all of them. Kaul used ninety different instruments and objects for the project, and each piece asks him to build a concrete realisation from very open instructions.

Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and died in New York in 1992. Kaul is both percussionist and composer, which suits a repertoire where the player must design his own concept and then test it against the score. Which instruments, how the instrumentation develops, and how the result stays alive for almost half an hour are his decisions. The recording was made on 22-25 April 2014 in the Kammermusiksaal of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, as a coproduction with Deutschlandradio.

The score of Variations I consists of transparent sheets with dots and lines, from which the performer derives tones, sounds and pauses. Kaul plays it on steel drums and mbira. Child of Tree asks the performer to toss coins to decide how to divide eight minutes into sections, and which instruments to use in each. In the two versions of Composed Improvisation, one for snare drum and one for one-sided drums with or without jangles, Cage fixes time brackets and leaves the content to chance. Like Child of Tree, each lasts exactly eight minutes here. Inlets, for three players of water-filled conch shells and one conch player using circular breathing and the sound of fire, is the most rudimentary. Three players each hold four water-filled conch shells and turn them, a fire of pine cones is lit, and a conch blown like a horn ends the piece.

27'10.554" is the one fully composed work here, its title giving its exact duration, and it takes up more than a third of the disc. The programme follows Cage's own view that everything audible can be music, even if it is not composed. He once said that the music he preferred, even to his own, was "what we are hearing if we are just quiet". The disc belongs to Wergo's Edition John Cage.

CD, Wergo WER 7320 2, released in 2015, in the Edition John Cage series.