AMM
AMM music is supposed to admit all sounds but the members of AMM have marked preferences. An open-ness to the totality of sounds implies a tendency away from traditional musical structures towards informality. Governing this tendency -reining it in- are various thoroughly traditional musical structures such as saxophone, piano, violin, guitar, etc., in each of which reposes a portion of the history of music. Further echoes of the history of music enter through the medium of the transistor radio (the use of which as a musical instrument was pioneered by John Cage)” Cornelius Cardew, Towards an Ethics of Improvisation
AMM music is supposed to admit all sounds but the members of AMM have marked preferences. An open-ness to the totality of sounds implies a tendency away from traditional musical structures towards informality. Governing this tendency -reining it in- are various thoroughly traditional musical structures such as saxophone, piano, violin, guitar, etc., in each of which reposes a portion of the history of music. Further echoes of the history of music enter through the medium of the transistor radio (the use of which as a musical instrument was pioneered by John Cage)” Cornelius Cardew, Towards an Ethics of Improvisation
Member of: Eddie Prévost
Continuum +
Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Eddie Prévost quartet. This album is composed of two parts. Part 1 was recorded at the Bracknell Jazz Festival on the 3rd of July, 1983. Part 2 was recorded at Porcupine Studios London. The album includes five tracks performed by Larry Stabbins - Tenor and Soprano Saxophones, Veryan Weston - Piano, Marcio Mattos - Double Bass, and Eddie Prévost - Drums.
"The music you hear on this DL has a distinct urgency and excitement. It moves forward in a comp…
So Are We, So Are We
Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Eddie Prévost and Alan Wilkinson recorded at Barefoot Studios, London, England on 10th January 2006. The album includes five tracks performed by Eddie Prévost - Percussion, Alan Wilkinson - alto & baritone saxophones.
His work in AMM has labeled him a percussionist, and rightly so, but listen to “Supa, Supa;” with its shuffling high-hat and dancing brushes – this is idiomatically aware jazz drumming of a very high order. Some of the best music occu…
Concert, V
Eddie Prévost & Veryan Weston. Recorded in England, 5/98, mixed by Evan Parker. "'Beauty as an Ear Thing' is a meticulous exploration of texture, full of soft explosions, the reverberant ring of spinning metals, and overtones that glow like embers, dying into silence; this music wouldn't be misplaced on an AMM disc. 'Clustered' rebuilds something out of the emptiness. The dislocated rhythmic feel is like an abstraction of something Monk and Max Roach might have played together. 'Fingers and drum…
Material Consequences
Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Eddie Prévost recorded at Gateway Studio, Kingston, England on 16th of July, 2001. The album includes four tracks performed by Eddie Prévost - Percussion.
"Alone in the studio, it is just me trying to breathe life into the materials I have chosen at hand. I am looking, hoping, that something unexpected will crop up. The gongs, chimes, bells, skins, strings and resonating boxes are a rich environment. You never know for sure what you will dig up. I …
Loci of Change
Matchless Recordings presents a live concert by Eddie Prévost recorded at Gateway Studio, Kingston, England on September 10th, 1996. The album includes six tracks performed by Eddie Prévost - Percussion.
"After a life-long study of percussion, Eddie Prévost has discovered ways of making the instruments reveal hidden aspects of thei voices. These, his first solo recordings, comprise and anthology of this long study but at the same time there is a freshness here that suggests the research is far f…
Minute Particulars
In 177 pages Eddie Prévost includes twenty-nine thought-provoking essays on ideas, perceptions, reactions and the practices of improvised music, as well as a short index. Reactions to the real world - in particular, the political, corporate and commercial ones - are never far from the surface and the place of the individual is mirrored through that of the musician developing his or her own position, responsiveness and voice in a group context. Discourses include the questioning of terminology su…
Piano Music 1959-70
‘Piano Music 1959-70’ is a reissue of an album that enjoys cult status
among Cardew aficionados. The standout piece remains Volo solo (1965),
conceived originally for Tilbury as an attempt to coin a new type of
virtuosity. Cornelius Cardew expected it to be taken at a reckless tempo so that,
as he wrote, ‘the piano should seem to be breaking apart’. But the
material he gives the pianist – 60 inchoate fragments interlinked by
pauses – trips impetus up, the structure left with a hiccuping
s…
Chamber Music 1955-64
Restocked, reduced price. The works on this CD represent arguably the most experimental and radical works to come out of Britain in the past 40 years. Cornelius Cardew's scores from the early 1960's are notable for their elegant, original and precise notational scores, labyrinthine blueprints for realisation as totally new and original compositions. They are open to ever new interpretations whose possibilities are restricted only by the creativity of the performer. It is this responsibility laid…
Cornelius Cardew. A reader
A very nice book brings together a diverse collection of Cornelius Cardew's major essays and writings from different stages of his career, together with commentaries by other writers associated with his work. It reflects developments, changes and contradictions in his thinking about music from the late 1950s to the end of his life. As a companion volume to John Tilbury's biography 'Cornelius Cardew a life unfinished', Copula, 2006 (ISBN 0 9525492 3 9) it provides essential material for the study…
Apogee
Restocked, reduced price. 2CD Edition. In 1968 Mainstream released an LP with AMM on one side and MEV (Musica Electronica Viva, then based in Italy) on the other. In 2004 the two groups re-convened in London. Two of the five original AMM (Eddie Prevost and Keith Rowe), and three of the original five MEV (Alvin Curran, Frederick Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum) still in place. The only new boy on this CD is their contemporary John Tilbury; since 1980 he has been the stable third AMMusician. On CD …
Live in Allentown USA (1994)
More than any other group creating spontaneously improvised music, the members of AMM have a calm certainty about them, a serene sense of unhurriedness. There appears to be no doubt that whatever musical element is brought to light during their performance, it will prove capable of both generating beauty on its own and assuming its place as a structural element with what has preceded it. This live recording is in many ways typical of the group in its most common configuration of the '80s and '90…
Newfoundland (1992)
Restocked, reduced price. "Since its inception in 1966, the cooperative group AMM has been uncompromising in its commitment to freely improvised music. Often, especially early in its existence, this resulted in a harsh, aggressive sound field, one that even the most inquisitive newcomer might have difficulty approaching. By the mid-'80s, perhaps due to the mellowing that comes with age or the addition of pianist John Tilbury, AMM's music took a turn toward the quieter, more contemplative music e…
The Nameless Uncarved Block
In Ed Baxter's liner notes to this recording, he writes, "AMM exists where words fail". Indeed, AMM's steadfast avoidance of music which has any references apart from itself makes descriptive commentary a daunting task. In The Nameless Uncarved Block, however, recorded at live performances during the 1990 Taktlos Festival, the group comes as close as they've ever sounded to something resembling a free jazz unit. Partly, this is due to the inclusion of founding member Lou Gare on tenor sax. His p…
Combine + Laminates + Treatise (1984)
** Restocked, reduced price** A re-issue of the Pogus LP format with additional material taken from the same concert at the Arts Club, Chicago, USA, 25th May 1984. The difference in the music included on this CD version is the addition of Treatise '84. This, as the audience was aware, was an Amm improvisation inspired and guided, rather than dictated or controlled by Cornelius Cardew's graphic masterpiece. There is, of course, no way that this work could be identified as a composition in the acc…
Generative Themes (1982-83)
The title of this disc, Generative Themes, could be taken as a capsule description of the nature of AMM's music: creating a sound and following it to see where it takes one, generating new sounds along the way, choosing which of these to follow and, as if ambling through a wooded glade or an abandoned building, aurally mapping the territory with precision and poetry. This recording was made relatively shortly after the addition of pianist John Tilbury to the group, resulting in the core band tha…
To Hear and Back Again (1973-75)
** Restocked, reduced price** A reissue of what is chronologically the 3rd full Amm album, following AMM:1966 and The Crypt. Recorded during the years of 1973-75, this marks an unusual and little recognized period in the group's history. For about 5 years, Keith Rowe (and his guitar and electronics) had left the group (along with Cornelius Cardew), leaving AMM as a working duo of Eddie Prévost (drums) and Lou Gare (tenor saxophone). That makes this the most jazz-like version of AMM, but as the l…
AMMMusic
A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label's founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd's first manager, Peter Jenner (the title of Pink Floyd's 'Flaming' is a tribute to AMM's 'Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset'). Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging British ja…
From a strange place
Undisputed deans of the meta-music, captured live on their first ever tour of Japan in October 1995. After 30 years of AMMusic there's very little left to be said about the group. Suffice to say that this is more of their totally committed style of pure improvisation, scaling new heights of non-derivativeness. Music created with a piercing awareness of place and time, once created never to be repeated, even by themselves. This set was marked by an extreme level of quietness, a grappling with sil…
Norwich
Norwich, recorded in February, 2005, at the School of Music, University of East Anglia, presents the current two-member AMM of Prévost and Tilbury ” the third two-man version of the group (Prévost played as AMM with saxophonist Lou Gare and then Rowe in the 1970s). Rowe's departure is a tremendous shift, of course, both for his extraordinary sonic resourcefulness and his sometimes abrasive electronics (including his use of random or found verbal and musical messages). However, it is much more im…
Fine
Music for dance, by AMM. Recording of the concert given together with the dancer Fine Kwiatkowski at Musique Action festival produced by CCAM, Vendoeuvre-les-Nancy, France on 24th May 2001. The album's title connotation is at least dual. This is a recording of a live performance done in conjunction with dancer Fine Kwiatkowski (who, incidentally, is not audible), and it's certainly "fine" in the qualitative sense. One hopes the aura of "finality" implicit in the title doesn't apply. This is one …