Salvador Dali once presented Harpo Marx with a film script he had written, which Harpo very quickly lost. Such a response was both charming and entirely apposite. It is tempting to think that these notes might similarly be swallowed by oblivion, as commentary on AMM tends to lead one away from the music into superfluous description or unwieldy analysis. AMM exists where words fail - which is not to resort to hyperbole, but to give some indication of the area in which the group works. Rarely do we hear the human voice in AMM’s improvisations. When it does reach our ears, it is of two kinds: first, the chatter coming from adjacent spaces or the murmuring of people not immersed in the performance. The former is an indistinct element in the background din and easily ignored, even assimilated. The latter is obtrusive and its perpetrators are bombarded with unspoken requests to desist by those like myself, for whom it might take several minutes to adjust and begin to respond to the performance. One wishes upon them both oblivion and intimacy - simultaneously to cast them out of the room and to draw them into a state of mind consonant with the music. Secondly, there is the voice which emanates from the group, an occasional voice broadcast intermittently on the radio. There is a humorous dimension to the fact that in the supposed infinity of sounds available in the modern world, the alleged Global Village, that AMM should use short-wave, which garbles communication; and should also often pick up voices and musics of a numinous banality: Brian Johnson, the ‘Blue Danube’, etc. There is humour also in the transformation of these sounds, indicative of a sense of proportion that undercuts suggestively over determined statements such as Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Hitler was a radio man’, or Martin Heidegger’s contention that technology is a way of arranging the world so that we do not have to experience it. The tones of this voice from the radio are formal, distorted, enigmatic, and firmly placed within the realm of technology. This is the voice presented not as something internal, as an element of the body reaching outwards, but as something always already becoming technological, outside the body. Language - the ramblings perhaps of a political commentator or cricket pundit - is presented here as arrested communication, as transformation, as transmissions stuck in the spaces between human beings, implicitly inadequate and unable to bridge the gap. As this disjointed speech breaks into, and is swallowed by, the music, it underlines the music’s particular communicative qualities. It suggests that the music is, in part, a refusal of language, specifically a refusal of an illusory presence offered by speech.
Language surfaces within the technological realm, its point of origin being within the instrument (the radio) - a semblance of an irrecoverable origin. The music does not attempt to reinscribe a myth of the possibility of a ‘pure’ communication between two absolute origins, but instead is presented as an activity bound by technology (mallet, stick, fan, bow, guitar, drum, piano, saxophone, radio, etc.) and specific to a time and place. The relationship of human beings to instruments is not an idealistic one of reciprocal auto affection, but a more doubtful, tense relationship of self definition and discovery: of self generation, then. The music is not proffered as an alternative to language - there is no element of argument or manifesto presented in the sounds. Rather, it exists perhaps uncannily alongside that element of communication which seemingly defies language, touching as it does on such areas as psychic phenomena, mass hysteria, panic. The vertiginous sense of self oblivion and profound pleasure produced implies some kind of intuitive response, but any clairvoyant sense of what is actually going on is ordinarily undercut by our inability to gain any self conscious foothold as the music is being realized in performance.
A recording of the performance seemingly offers the possibility of ‘documentary’ recovery, allowing a consciously analytical response to the sounds and the developing structure. Even as it refigures the past, however, the recording indicates its remoteness. The performance, a digressive movement away from an abandoned source, is not resolved but rather dissolves. Dissolution is grasped as an integral part of the musical performance: informed by the environment and circumscribed by the singular configuration of its audience, it structurally embraces its own oblivion. The group’s own enigmatic statement about AMM - ‘It was there a few minutes before we thought of it ‘ -suggests that its activities were, from the beginning, divergent, digressive, severed from an origin the dissolution of which was accepted and built upon: no question of recovery here. This severance from notions of authority suggests provocatively that the identity of the group extends beyond the musicians to (at least) those in attendance. A recording tends to negate this suggestion, reclaiming from the audience its contingent authority at the performance.
A recording provides no sense of the environmental elements of a performance, nor does it give a semblance of the productive psycho physiological input of the audience - of the audience’s ongoing response, a responsive silence. Instead, it is informed by the history of the medium of recording. As it documents the performance, a recording also articulates its passing away. Fixing time, it gives only an approximation of the way in which, during a musical performance, time alters. Its transcription of events is different in both kind and degree from that of biological memory, in its short term and long term manifestations, and it can only provide an approximation of the actual performance, forensic evidence. Recording implies a degree of self-sufficiency and of self influence: it enables aesthetic decisions to be taken over long periods of time. Whereas in rock music, self influence is conscious, deliberated and linked to the structure of the medium of tape, with AMM the medium is the performance and the emphasis is on biological memory: self influence is not linked to external documentary, but to the structure provided by specific instruments and to the response of disparate audiences. AMM does not approach tape as a medium to be manipulated: the recording is incidental (which is not to suggest that it is deficient, merely that it is significantly different from a performance - another matter entirely).
Tape assumes access to a kind a self consciousness and a recording accordingly tends to suggest that the musicians alone ‘direct’ the work. Typically, to the listener of a recording, it suggests that they are ‘in control’ (partly perhaps because one can turn the record on or off, etc. but partly also because one may feel more comfortable with the idea of, first, control per se and, secondly, that the human rather than the machine has the upper hand: here we enter the ideological realm). In a performance, this is evidently not so: both musicians and audience comprise the performance. It is tempting to posit an economic transaction here, whereby we ‘lend’ time to the performers in return for some reward (a result, a good time). But this is to miss the point that the performance is concerned with the subtle manipulation of, even the generation of, time. (‘Time’ , says Artie Shaw, ‘is all you’ve got.’). We can partially recreate the conditions in which to listen to the recording, but our role as co-producers of the music is negated. Instead, recording creates its own context - fugitive gestures become familiar and the recording seems to produce us. However engaged in the work (and even, for instance, if we attended and can vividly recall the concert that has been recorded), our input is relatively minimal. A recording articulates our absence as productive listeners from the performative process, and the absence of the musicians. The presence of a singular structuring device - the tape machine - is at once suggestive of our own partial role at a performance as individuals (we know from experience that each person may hear and feel something different at the same concert) and of the interactive process which is realized by and in the group AMM, a group which implicates its audience.
At one concert I attended, Keith Rowe, in reaching for a particular mallet with which to play the guitar, knocked it to the floor, out of his reach. Several of us at the front (I felt, or imagined) momentarily started forwards to retrieve it, but withdrew - perhaps reckoning that this would be to interfere with the performance, would break the spell. Relayed as an anecdote, this perhaps seems a bit precious, but it conveys in a clumsy fashion how the audience is implicated in the performance.
One would hope eventually, not to know whether or not it was apposite, and consonant with the music, to return the mallet to the table; but rather, to be sufficiently aware as to anticipate its fall, and to catch it as it fell.
Ed. Baxter
1990