Th e performance represented by this CD took place on 15th of May 2010 in the concert hall of the Jasło Cultural Centre in southern Poland. I had spoken to John Tilbury in 2007 about the possibility of AMM performing in Jasło, but for various reasons the project did not come to fruition until three years later. We had not planned for a CD release of the concert; in fact, we only spoke about recording the day before. T here was no opportunity for the usual setup procedures. Th e recording was only intended as a document of the occasion.
The concert began with John Tilbury using the piano to produce a gamelan-like quality, which was quickly followed by Eddie Prévost bowing a cymbal producing subtle metallic sounds. One could feel an electric atmosphere of concentration and note the exceptional care and elegance with which the performers selected even the tiniest details of the complex sound structure. Intriguing phrases from the prepared piano and sonorous tones from percussion instruments waft ed around the huge expanse of the hall — whose excellent acoustics let the audience immerse themselves in the music — savouring the subtle sounds emerging from the silence. e changes within the slow stream of improvisation occurred in such a natural way introduced by either musician by turn. Sometimes a highly abstract motif seemed to be a logical development rather than a step into the unknown — which in reality it was. The dominant impression was that such an advanced level of intuitive understanding between the two performers was the result of many years of collaboration. In my view each sound produced during the concert was not only ‘desirable’ but also essential (inevitable) and created its own profound aesthetic justification. Especially noteworthy was the compelling way in which both musicians made use of silence, whose role in AMM is as important as sound. Th e performance of a shorter or longer period of silence entailed the same creative intervention as did playing a sound or motif. Th e moments when the sound structure intensified and thickened became less frequent yet did not disappear completely.
Particularly embedded in my memory are two moments: one was an exceptionally loud and shattering fragment of sound when dust could be seen rising out of the piano. And, when Eddie got up from his percussion and went to the wood-panelling, playing the wall with a beater generating a very low and vibrating sound — a convincing demonstration that any object may be used as a means to create music. It is only because I attended the concert, and can recall it in my mind, that now when listening to the recording I can identify the sources of those extraordinary sounds. The music presented on this CD requires a serious commitment from the listener. However, anyone familiar with the music of AMM would expect nothing else. To uncover the hidden beauty of these lovingly craft ed improvised sound abstractions requires an appropriate level of concentration on the part of the listener. Such effort will be rewarded by a profound aesthetic experience. In organising this concert I feel honoured I have been able to contribute, albeit inadvertently, to the release
of another AMM CD.
Andrzej Serwa — August 2010
So another year, another AMM album review, or so it feels… It is of course probably inevitable that I would like Uncovered Correspondence – A postcard from Jaslo quite a bit (it in fact pushes Trinity hard as the best post-Rowe AMM album yet) simply because it features two of my favourite musicians in the world, but is there anything new to write about this music? What can I add that I haven’t written in previous reviews?
Well as they say, AMM album reviews are as alike or unalike as trees (sorry!) so my words will sound familiar. The familiarity of this music though (and it is certainly very familiar to me) does not make it bad music at all. That we know how Prevost and Tilbury worked together, that we understand the dynamics, the delicacy, the fine balance in the music already just leads us to appreciate its beauty all the more. Uncovered Correspondence then, is as archetypal a duo AMM disc as you can imagine. Tilbury plays in an utterly beautiful manner, mostly tonal, but percussive here and there as well as touching a few points in between. Prevost focusses mostly on bowed metals- handheld cymbals and bowls and a tam tam I suspect, and the music talks and sings out in the language we have come to know, and many of us love.
What makes Uncovered Correspondence so good then is that just about every second feels just right. There are noisy aggressive sections, though not too many, and there are plenty of quiet, thoughtful periods, but nothing feels out of place, it all seems to fit and flow together wonderfully. The music has a calmness to it for much of the time, a spare, light quality that seems to use just enough sound to create the music and no more. Prevost is on real form here, letting his metals sing out in an often very pure manner, with the decaying tones caught beautifully on what is a nice recording of what feels like an intimate, intense performance. Tilbury is just Tilbury - stunningly beautiful in everything he does, both inside and outside of the piano, but it is the combination of the two of them that makes this album work so well. The three pieces have a simple, airy almost poetic feel to them. The third of the three ‘Paragraphs’ that the album is divided into is extraordinarily beautiful, blooming out into grand swathes of drama but then disappearing into highly charged near-silences.
Perhaps a slightly crass observation, but AMM shorn of Rowe have a vaguely Eastern feel to the music, perhaps because they always remind me of the wonderful Such album made by Prevost, Tilbury and Yoshikazu Iwamoto some thirteen years ago now, but perhaps because the music, now bereft of Rowe’s drones and electronic interference sounds lacks the feeling of linearity that the trio AMM had, and so when the musicians make a sound here, it dies into silence rather than into Rowe’s backgrounds. So somehow the music feels more elemental, stripped down and calm. It even feels slower in some way, though I doubt that it actually is.
Uncovered Correspondence sounds like the duo form of AMM finally moving past the issue of what to do without Rowe now. It feels confident, fully formed, and is purely the result of two good friends and wonderful musicians working together as they know how. In an interview earlier this year Tilbury said that he thought it was probably too late now for AMM to be taken off into another new direction by adding a further permanent member, and so the duo seem left to refine what they have, enjoy the experience of playing together, occasionally adding guests maybe but ultimately producing increasingly more beautiful music in a similar vein. For many this just won’t be enough, but for me, I am more than happy to just return to music this beautiful time and time again. If these musicians were twenty years younger then yes accuse them of stagnation but for now they have reached a state in their playing together that most musicians will never achieve, and recordings of them together, and in particular recordings of them as good as this one are a joy to behold.
Richard Pinnell
26 December 2010
It is given to very few artists to have created a language entirely their own, but that is what the British band(?) AMM has done over the years, in various line-ups and configurations, with Eddie Prévost on drums as the only unifying element since 1965, and with John Tilbury on piano for the last two decades, here with just the two of them. You may like them or not, but they have made history, and they still do, with lots of young musicians moving into the broad avenue they created.
They were among the first artists to work with the endless sound possibilities of their instruments, like archeologists carefully unearthing new layers of sounds, and especially those that had never been there in the first place!
This album, subtitled "Postcards from Jaslo" was recorded at the concert hall of the Jasielski Dom Kultury (Jaslo Cultural Centre) in southern Poland on 15th May 2010, and the entire album resonates with the space that it was recorded in.
The music remains fascinating, even more minimalist due to the limited instrumentation, yet equally evocative and expressive as their previous albums. And yes, the approach and the overall sound are predictable - this is AMM beyond any doubt - the preciousness, the sophistication, the inventiveness, the cautious discipline, the love for the sound itself, the incredible tension and sustained sense of anticipation .... it is all there, beautifully there ...
The absolute brilliance of this music is the attention given to detail. In most other kinds of music, there seems to be an absolute abundance of notes, spent and consumed carelessly, but here, with AMM every note seems and sounds incredibly valuable, as something that has to be used sparingly, in order to really be fully appreciated and savoured.
Majestic!
Stef — All About Jazz — March 10th 2011
Depuis 1965, un des plus célèbres groupes de free improvisation anglais nous a déjà livré de nombreuses œuvres mémorables (AMM Music, At the roundhouse, Sounding music par exemple). La nouvelle carte postale d'AMM est un enregistrement live, au sud de la Pologne, par les deux derniers membres courants: John Tilbury et Eddie Prevost (l'un des fondateurs).
Divisée en trois paragraphes, elle commence par quelques notes, puis quelques accords et quelques clusters de piano très espacés, où une place considérable est accordée soit au silence, soit aux frottements de cymbale à la teinte très riche et métallique de Prevost. La présence de Tilbury se fait ensuite de plus en plus éparse, tandis que les cymbales sont jouées avec délicatesse jusqu'au frottement rauque d'un tom basse. Viennent ensuite des battements réguliers de cymbale, des éléments réapparaissent, Prevost semble vouloir nous offrir des repères tandis que Tilbury, au contraire, s'éloigne de plus en plus. Le deuxième paragraphe de cette correspondance offre encore plus de silence, l'abstraction devient plus extrême, le timbre utilisé dans la première pièce est réutilisé et approfondi, radicalisé. En même temps, chaque son, chaque évènement, possède une force incroyable de par le silence où le calme qui l'entoure, même si le jeu est complètement minimaliste et souvent discret. La deuxième partie de cette pièce possède un caractère mélodique, l'utilisation d'accords tonaux, d'arpèges ou de modes, qui finiront par se mélanger et s'affronter, est sous-tendue par le même jeu de cymbale qu'au début du disque, même s'il est devenu plus délicat. En tout cas, les notes en elles-mêmes ne sont pas si importantes pour Tilbury qui s'attache surtout à laisser vivre chaque son qui peut sortir du piano, et le laisser résonner tout en admirant la rencontre des harmoniques qui s'ensuit. Une phase plutôt méditative ou contemplative en ce milieu de disque. Le troisième chapitre suit la même direction, on ressent de plus en plus la décomposition spectrale de chaque son, l'exploration sonique devient de plus en plus profonde, forte, et puissante. Après la méditation, place à une agression murale, à l'amplification extrême des clusters; la tessiture grave du piano se confond avec la grosse caisse, la symbiose s'opère violemment puis la vie peut reprendre son cours, tranquillement et sereinement, presque légèrement. La fin de cet épitre se fait effectivement tout en douceur, le son est aérien, éthéré, tout en maintenant une certaine gravité et une certaine tension.
L'atmosphère est sensible, tendue et inattendue, on ne sait jamais quand est-ce que l'un se décidera à jouer, et encore moins ce qui pourra bien émerger de sa conscience. Mais le développement de chaque matière apaise considérablement l'audition car il se maintient toujours sur le déploiement d'un matériau assez réduit. Après quelques périples aventureux au début de l'enregistrement, le même timbre est exploré tout au long de cette heure, et l'exploration perd de sa froideur une fois que nous acceptons de vivre aux côtés de ces sons, de contempler leur vie, leur structure et leur spectre. Chaque idée est claire, assumée, originale, et ne correspond à aucune attente: la musique d'AMM n'a perdue ni de sa fraicheur, ni de sa créativité.
Impro-Sphere 19th March 2011
We've come a long way from the initial surprise generated by the first appearances of musicians and groups utilizing what, at that time, were perceived by inexperienced audiences as the "unusual" components of an instrument, or the characteristics of the very room in which the events took place. Most times, those "discoveries" were related to two names. One is John Cage, the other is AMM. Both associations are by now commonplace with today's critics, and a large number of those "explorers" have settled in comfortable patterns where silence ruptured by extremely rarefied sounds — either from the instruments or the surrounding environment — is the obvious course of action, in virtue of the relative effortlessness of getting accolades (and, in several occasions, grants) with minimum compositional effort. Meanwhile, some of the above mentioned unskilled listeners have become "experts" of the genre. Face it: the original remains the brightest point of reference.
Uncovered Correspondence — recorded by John Tilbury and Eddie Prévost in Jaslo, Poland, on May 15, 2010 — is in that sense a triple lesson: in restraint and sensibility, for sure; but especially in how to appear "silent" while sound is instead present and clearly established.
A word that comes to mind when a record like this is spun in my house is "tact". There's a big difference between an actor of nothingness and an artist aware of the complex physical and psychological relationships linking aural perception, movement and stillness. The real ability, as Andrzej Serwa points out in the liners, is that of demonstrating that "any object may be used as a means to create music". Yet this is a dangerous affirmation, for that's exactly the conviction that opened a huge door to the many pretenders that inhabit this district.
Of course, Tilbury and Prévost are immune to the risk: their skill in eliciting the ideal resonance, or depicting a delicate combination of deceivingly straightforward figurations, at the exact instant in which the music calls for that is typically inspiring. Piano and percussion produce advanced varieties of untarnished acoustic purity. The improvisation appears finely composed, and this is the best compliment I would love to receive as a musician. Gestures whose logic is palpable, sonorities evoking an aura of quiet ritual totally incomparable to the ridiculousness of a vacuous mannerism. Dozens of "composers" still try to hide inside that kind of shell, yet AMM — with or without Keith Rowe — have always walked at least ten years in advance. Imitators will perennially be doomed to failure, in spite of the fact that some are even collaborating with these overly democratic masters.
Massimo Ricci 14th March 2011
Possessing unmatched force capable of continental reshaping, glaciers imperceptibly drift through time and shift in shape. Much like AMM, whose fluid membership has been sculpting raw noise topographies since 1965. Operating here as a duo, percussionist Eddie Prévost bows and occasionally strikes metal, creating resonating timbres that shine, grate and pulsate, the abrasive canvas upon which John Tilbury sprinkles his sparse piano clusters and gamelan-like preparations. Understated elegance and attention to detail requires and rewards concentrated listening.
Montreal Mirror April 28 — May 4 2011
The longstanding British group AMM is represented by the pairing of pianist John Tilbury and percussionist Eddie Prévost on Uncovered
Correspondence, a 2010 Polish concert of hushed simplicity that could almost, at times, pass for minimalism (though it is defiantly ‘maximal’ in scope). Prévost’s percussion work is incredibly deep, bowed and shimmering cymbal gestures in counterpoint with the muted, interlocking cells of Tilbury’s Cage-ian piano. A delicate metronomic pulse emerges in the lastfive minutes of the first piece, unwavering patter skirting plaintive, low blocks of sound. As measured as restive breathing albeit punctuated by sharp admonishments, the three movements are examples of going back to the building blocks of musical creation.
Clifford Allen — New York City Jazz Record — December 2011
AMM
Uncovered Correspondence: a Postcard from Jasło
Matchless MRCD78
Some would argue that comfort is the last thing improvised music should give the listener; Eddie Prévost and John Tilbury would most probably concur. However, Uncovered Correspondence: a Postcard from Jasło is bafflingly comforting; not because it is bucolic, even though the ratio of cool calm passages to robust clangor is higher than usual on AMM’s recordings, but because the percussionist and the pianist have such a dependably refined and complementary rapport. This stands out more than usual because this concert recording is AMM’s first album since 2006’s that mysterious forest below London Bridge (Matchless) to feature Prévost and Tilbury as a duo. This rapport certainly didn’t evaporate on 08’s Trinity and 09’s Sounding Music (also on Matchless) that included adjuncts like John Butcher Christian Wolff and Ute Kanngiesser, but was instead absorbed in the larger ensembles. Isolated, Prévost and Tilbury’s emphasis on tone color and decay does not simply base-coat the music – it is the music in the main. Much the same was repeatedly said of AMM during Keith Rowe’s long tenure, but there seems to be something approaching a fundamental shift in AMM’s agenda since the noise-privileging guitarist’s departure – a new regard for beauty, though not in an ordinary sense of the word. Each of the three “Paragraphs” (the presumably Cardew-inspired designation of structure folds neatly into the correspondence theme) has exquisite moments where the chiming quality of Tilbury’s spare keyboarding dovetails with the more spectral timbres produced in the piano’s interior (he is always impressively nimble at producing roughly antiphonal exchanges with himself) or the metallic sheen of Prévost’s bowed cymbals. Not all of these passages simply hover in the stillness of the hushed concert hall; the album ends with a surprising and affecting outpouring before slipping into silence. While there is nothing dilutive or simplified about Uncovered Correspondence: a Postcard from Jasło, it is the most inviting album AMM has ever made.
Bill Shoemaker — Point of Departure Issue 33 February 2011
AMM Uncovered Correspondence: A Postcard from Jaslo
Reproduced on the front of Uncovered Correspondence is an old postcard showing the market square of Jaslo in southern Poland. In May 2010 the town's Cultural Centre hosted the AMM music relayed on this recording. Percussionist Eddie Prévost and pianist John Tilbury play for a little over an hour with great subtlety and concentration. Prévost bows metal, sets gongs and cymbals shimmering, makes stretched skins roar and moan. At one point, the sleevenotes reveal, he is actually sounding one of the venue's wood-panelled walls with a beater. Tilbury meticulously casts notes like pebbles, nuanced through weight and texture, gleaming with sustain. The outcome has mineral clarity and is exceptionally beautiful.
This AMM duo mark time with sound and create an arena of quiet intensity: a space — like a Japanese temple garden — devoted to attentiveness. AMM music invariably transforms experience of duration into a strong sense of location. As Evan Parker observed in notes for Prévost's 1996 release Loci of Change, the music provides "new space where we can sit quietly and be absorbed in listening". Uncovered Correspondence, divided into three 'paragraphs', has the feel of a self-contained and lucidly reflective statement. But as Parker noted of Prévost's solo work, it's "a social music that only completes a circuit when it is listened to as hard by the listener as it was by the player". Committed listeners will find that Prévost's and Tilbury's postcard from Jaslo says a great deal more than 'wish you were here."
Julian Cowley
Wire January 2011