This is the other John Adams, John Luther Adams, who, in his early 60s, is finally beginning to attract the international attention his thoughtful and strikingly original music deserves. Adams’s profound immersion in the natural world, his horror at the damage done to it, and his efforts to create what he has described as an ecology of composition suggest him as the musical equivalent of the great US poet Gary Snyder: both are important artists who put their work at the service of what they see and cherish around them.

Ilimaq is a 45-minute percussion solo with electronics, first performed in 2012. The title means “spirit journey” in the native Alaskan language Inupiaq – Adams lived in Alaska for almost 40 years, but now divides his time between New York and Mexico. The piece was composed in collaboration with Glenn Kotche, from the Chicago-based band Wilco, who has previously worked with new‑music ensembles such as eighth blackbird and the Bang on a Can All-Stars. The electronic backdrop – a mix of sampled sounds and digital delays of Kotche’s performance – creates an all-enveloping aural environment in which the live solo playing is the focus. The predominant sounds steadily evolve as the work goes on. The opening sections are characterised by low regular pulsings, while more metallic sounds combine with the trickling electronics in the centre of the work, and a much wider range of drums and cymbals is heard towards its ethereal close.

The careful way in which these sounds are graded sometimes recalls the solo and ensemble percussion pieces of Iannis Xenakis, but the impact of Adams’s music, with its ever‑changing auras of electronic transformations, is much less physical and far more subtle than those. Adams likens the role of the percussionist in leading the way through the soundscapes he creates in Ilimaq to that of a shaman in the Inuit tradition, conducting journeys to and from the spirit world. And from what are often the most basic rhythmic elements, he and Kotche create a work of great power and often surprising, stark beauty.