This music speaks for itself. So any attempt at characterization should be hedged with a warning that it might deflect the listener’s attention. The very fact of the attempt supposes the pre eminence of ‘character’. In Epilogue , one of his Essays Before A Sonata, Charles Ives made a strong case for what he called ‘substance.’ Substance, he wrote, “has something to do with character.†But what of sheer beauty? For Ives, ‘beauty’ was a problematical concept: “We like the beautiful and don’t like the ugly: therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don’t like is ugly - and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were we would like something we don’t like. So having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.†Ives contrasted ‘substance’ with ‘manner’ which “breeds a cussed cleverness only to be clever (a satellite of super industrialism) and perhaps to be witty in the bargain - not the wit in mother wit, but a kind of indoor, artificial, mental arrangement of things quickly put together which have to be learned and studied.â€
Well, there is nothing mannered about AMM. In place of the ‘indoor’ and the ‘artificial’, we discover breath taking openness and inventiveness. The sound of AMM is preterhumanly spacious and it makes sense to characterize this music less in human terms (as ‘lively’ and ‘graceful’, for example) than in terms of landscape. However, any landscape suggested by an AMM improvisation is light years from the affectively pastoral. It is akin perhaps to the paradoxically abstract landscapes of musique concrete.
This writer’s own description, written for his own benefit, of the recorded performance in Newfoundland frequently resorts to Arctic and aquatic imagery. So there are dangers in knowing even a little! It is surely too easy to resort to adjectives such as ‘rumbling’, ‘juddering’, ‘thudding’, rippling’ and ‘growling.’ This music is so stunningly immediate, so palpable, that it makes a nonsense of such musings.
Howard Skempton September 1993.
It might not be the role they aspire towards, but AMM are like the Holy Spirit of contemporary music. Whether their presence was noted or not, their Holy Spirit has somehow laid its touch on early English psychedelia and the late English oddness of the likes of Nurse With Wound, the variously extreme noise tests of Einstürzende Neubauten and primetime Sonic Youth, and lately, the soiled ambiences at the more interesting end of a increasingly tedious trend towards Techno silence.
So, AMM's essence spills over the entire waterfront from noise to silence, and its influence seeps into the most disparate and irreconcilable of factions, in the process dissolving their contradictions. If this makes AMM sound like supreme shapeshifters or some sort of chameleon capable of harmonising with any hip scene you care to mention, then I should point out that AMM are never less than recognisable as AMM. Quite an acheivement for a group dedicated to the idea that there is no such thing as a right or wrong sound. If that makes it all sound a little too easy and laissez-faire, the character that has distinguished AMM from the rest os their commitment to making something of such a superficially simple, but in practice extraordinarily difficult idea. It has held good from AMMMUSIC 1966 through to Newfoundland, recorded in1992, with the current line-up of Eddie Prévost, John Tilbury and Keith Rowe.
Without the spectator element of AMM live, where you can see how the percussionist, pianist and guitarist respectively beat, stroke, cajole an seduce sounds out of their instruments, the resultant music gets ever closer to that definition of pure form promoted by the great Polish artist anddecadent Sl Witkiewicz aka Witkacy. That is: art — in this case music — that cannot be reduced to anything other than itself andtherefore momentarily alerts or shocks the listener to the true strangeness and beauty of being.
AMM's singular shocking moment in Newfoundland is stretched to a taut 76 minute whole. Any one detail ispacked with absorbing incident: dig an instance featuring distant-sounding chimes, the loose, dank and otherworldly knots f piano notes and the great, ghastly bowel-rattling laughter of Rowe's guitar-sprung electronics. And then a lost radio voice is fed through Rowe's pickup, temporarily anchoring the night in space and time. Rowe's ether-trawling catapults youback to the excitement of the dawn of broadcasting. Way bacvk then, a listener was asked if h could hear the singing of Caruso. No, he replied, but "I could occsionally catch the ecstasy." Just picture that early, primitive listening pleasure, when radio hams strained topick up music over transatlantic wires, unsure whether they were tuning into heavenly static or the voiuce of angels, and you begin to get close to the pleasure of AMM.
Biba Kopf
The Wire (UK) July 1994
Active since the mid-1960s, England's AMM have become an icon of the free improvisational movement. Newfoundland, a live album recored in 1992, has become one of their most acclaimed albums along with the 1967 debut, and is often cited as a good starting point for those wishing to familiarize themselves with the band's music. While this is not accessible fare by any means--until the last twenty-five minutes there is little in the way of melody on offer, but there is plenty of musical violence, and clocking in at over an hour with no subdivision into tracks, it requires a time investment to familiarize oneself with--it is often more spacious and minimalistic affair than some of the band's earlier work, and in that sense may be less alienating. But regardless of whether you're new to the band or not, it is, undoubtedly, a masterpiece.
Some may find the album's length unapproachable, but in fact it is actually a huge part of what makes this album great. You cannot digest this easily the way you would a song; instead, you must adjust your state-of-mind, so that you can continuously engage AMM's art for one hour and seventeen minutes of your life with no distraction. This realignment of the listener's thought processses is a part of that art.
The AMM recorded here is a trio, consisting of percussionist and founding-member Eddie Prevost, pianist John Tilbury, and guitarist Keith Rowe. The band at times reaches great intensity, but it is not designed to fill up the headspace with sound at all times, and for most of the performance there is a great deal of void between the instruments. Prevost reveals himself to be unafraid to unleash his battery in aggressive ways early on, but his bursts of energy are not uncontrolled spasms; they are controlled and at times even jazz-inflected, though AMM are not a jazz band. Towards the middle of the album he also brings in tuned instruments almost resembling a gamelan, complementing the piano perfectly. He is neither a beat-keeper nor an odd-time virtuoso, but a man who treats his instruments as part of the soundscape, the way Lustmord might treat a thunderstorm sample.
And speaking of Lustmord, Keith Rowe's guitar here is something that must be heard to be believed. At no time does it resemble any guitar you have heard; instead it sounds like something straight out of a dark ambient or industrial, a churning, mechanical sound generator that does wonders to transform AMM's stage into a living sonic environment. He is a master of the prepared guitar, and on here he also beats Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their own game years in advance by interjecting a disembodied voices into the music by tuning into the radio, most prominently late in the album amid rich, fluid piano chords.
John Tilbury's piano at least sounds like a piano, and although his playing is often sparse and atonal, recalling the work of George Crumb, it is still an easy object to latch onto in AMM's dark world. In the album's final twenty-five minutes he begins to introduce more familiar forms of beauty, with sparse, gorgeous chords and, eventually, a slow melody, gently bringing the listener back from their journey beyond their comfort zone. Or at least, so you think--never one to let you get comfortable, Eddie Prevost picks up the intensity severely a little over ten minutes before the end, and the album ends ambiguously.
This isn't a flawless album. One weakness I identify is that, at the turning point I mentioned in the previous paragraph, Tilbury responds with some rather weak fast jazzy playing; it would have been more interesting had he continued to play gently and allow a juxtaposition to emerge. These occasional dubious choices, though, do not prevent this album from achieving its goals. This is not noise, but music of a supreme level of artistry that, if you let it, will reside in your subconsious forever.
Rating: 9/10
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