Pretty much every aspect of Charlemagne Palestine’s career is meant to confound Western audiences, its expectations about performance, intent and work. What is a proper piece of well wrought keyboard music? Palestine might know the answer. And maybe his recordings reveal the answer. But just as likely, the guy intends to be a difficult guy to be difficult.

Trained as a cantor – the dude who sings in temple – Palestine’s name is event intended to conjure up a batch of dissent. Kinda funny, though, huh? Either way, using ecstatic and ritualistic means as scaffolding for his compositions, the keyboardist and pianist was a contemporary of the West Coast avant-gardists from the Bay Area as well as LaMonte Young and his cohort. Wrapping himself in the spectacle of performace differentiated Palestine a bit from his peers in that costuming, while a part of the rock community, hadn’t transitioned to composers as of yet. Sure, Young’s Eternal gatherings most likely found players draped in black, all serious and austere. But Palestine looked like an acid casualty, all alone on stage working a few notes back and forth.

Best known for his Strumming Music, first released in 1974 and reissued a few times since, the composition actually has nothing to do with strumming and focuses on an acoustic piano. Granted, the title could reference anything from Cage’s work to prepared pianos. It’s just a bit nonspecific, but still confounding to listeners not privy to the secret history of America’s 20^th century composed musics. The piece itself is the alternating of two notes back and forth after an intial introduction outlining the chords. Pacing picks up as the fifty-two minutes progress. But what makes Palestine something of an underrated genius is that he’d apparently rigged his instrument to slowly de-tune itself as the pace increased, creating dissonance where there should otherwise have been nothing but consonance. At first a bit grading to listen to, but progressively soothing, somehow, the work can eventually become background noise to pretty much any endeavor.

One might guess that with such a simple statement of intent, Palestine wouldn’t have anywhere to go – nor Riley, Reich or Young. But this keyboardist saw the potential of recreating similar sound narratives on a wealth of keyboards, not just acoustic ones. Mort Aux Vaches was recorded in 1999 with a few collaborators and doesn’t sound too distant from Palestine’s best known, earlier works. Whether or not examining his catalog in totality is worth it, who knows? There aren’t too many pairs of notes to work with.