review 2 The Wire

In 1966, as AMM began their attempts to scale walls of sound in London, Musica Elettronica Viva formed in Rome. MEV's three American avant garde composers, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum "rejected all forms of hierarchy, all forms of organisation, all forms of leadership", as Curran told Phil England last year in The WIre 249. "No director, no score, no knowledge of when the music might begin or end… It was erasing our whole background, everything we were supposed to be, everything we were supposed to do and basically our whole cultural mission in life." Their utopian improvised score 'Spacecraft', designed to raise themselves and their audience to a zone of new consciousness where revolutionary zeal might actually gain some traction, calls to mind Buckmlnster Fuller's 'Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth', written In 1963. Fuller opens with a statement about finding the correct form for whatever task you have in mind: if you are caught in a shipwreck and there's no room on a life raft, then a piano lid might serve the same purpose. But the best way to design a life preserver from scratch is not necessarily to start with a piano lid shape, ImprovIsing with the tools at hand can help, but you might not end up with something that's universally acceptable. And there it is; free improvisation's dilemma in a nutshell.

'Apogee' chronicles a historic meeting, documenting both groups on two consecutive days in May 2004, the first improvising as a coalition in the studio, the second performing as separate factions in front of a live audience at London's 'Freedom Of The City Festival'. This could have been issued as two separate CDs of each group, but this particular two day spate was always conceived as a double act. Players of this generation, where cooperation and coexistence are absolute imperatives, wouldn't call this a 'soundclash'. Instead the model is MEV's notion of the 'soundpool': an unsupervised field with the gates left open, Each ticking second holds the potential for total change, for renewal and revolution. It can't be an easy music or mindset to sustain, but these are the finest players of this improvisatory mode, and 'Apogee' contains some of the best music any of them has ever put on record.

The studio date took place at Gateway in South London, and is carved up in three sections entitled 'Apogee Parts: 1-3'. For the opening 18 minutes the two groups sound like behemoths lumbering into action, cyclopean denizens blinking in the light, with a tentativeness typical of this mode of communal, altruistic exploration. Then Eddie Prévost introduces some incredible bowed cymbal resembling a wailing child, which seems to draw the others into a more focused mutual project. MEV are essentially now a keyboard trio — piano and two synths —-and their subtle deployment frames much of the acoustic activity (Curran keeps an array of devices at his disposal, including horns, finger percussion and plastic tweety birds).

Apogee usually signifies 'the highest farthest point'; its original meaning derives from astronomy, referring to the point at which an orbiting body is furthest from its gravitational centre. Should we read into this that these groups, or certain Individuals within them, now find themselves at divergent points after a lifetime in orbit around each other,? AMM have increasingly been about playing against silence. MEV were always a more noisy proposition, and here the twin synthesizers of Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum provide a much more active noise floor than AMM ever utilise. The close pairing is instructive, as it's possible to hear the two groups' discrete methods. For example. MEV deal in longer developmental arcs, lingering among the drones and textures from their synths, punctured by peculiar interventions such as Teitelbaum's abstract whispering, or Curran's amateurish parps on his hunting horn. With AMM there's a stronger sense that at any moment something will drastically change: a segment of barely audible sonic glimmer might be capsized with the beat of a drum or an inappropriate explosion of Muzak or Grime from Keith Rowe's radio set. There seems little space for pianists Tilbury and Rzewski, who interject and irrupt rather than drive the narrative. But there are points where the groups melt and gel in spectacular style, In 'Apogee Part Two' there's a thrilling duet as Prévost shadows Curran's horn with his horsehaired cymbal; 'Part Three' is a more evenly balanced electroacoustic conversation in which Rowe and Prévost rise to the provocation of MEV's weird 70s space sounds.

The live date was the opening event of London's 'Freedom Of The City' Festival, and perversely this historic pairing was programmed during an afternoon slot. MEV begin with a feisty fanfare and appear to relish their 40 minutes. Rzewski trundling out the odd classical or bluesy lick, They draw on a bank of samples including ethnic stringed instruments, which can occasionally feel like a naff 'musical journey', but they proceed with a palette and pace that's unlike anyone else in Improv at the moment, all the more extraordinary for their lack of regular meeting.

AMM's jive set begins testily with Tilbury stabbing at each extreme of his ivories and Keith Rowe pumping belching FX hum and interfering obscenely with his guitar innards. With the hindsight that, shortly after this show, Prévost published a book that took strong issue with the playing methods and attitude of guitarist Keith Rowe, I can't help but hear conflict and argument enacted during this recording, though I don't remember it being so apparent during the actual set. After 24 minutes Prévost answers Rowe's grunting strings by striking reports on an upturned cymbal; Details are aggrandized on CD that were soaked up by the hall's wood paneling, principally Rowe's radiophonic interruptions of repetitive beats from pirate stations and shout-outs from tower block DJs. In a piece lasting nearly 40 minutes, Rowe has faded himself out before half an hour has expired, and the last four minutes are spun out by Tilbury alone, pedaling on the bottom notes in a downward drift into a penetrating, loaded silence in which grudges hover unspoken. The final pages of the operating manual are left blank, for notes.