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
Live at I-and-E
This is a long-awaited re-issue, unavailable since 2006. The duo had formed the previous year for ErstQuake in NYC and this was to be their second and, as yet, only other performance together. The breadth and depth of [the] music is totally inspiring, I absolutely love this piece of music. Total unity in sound to make a perfect piece in the moment. It doesn't get better than this! (Gordon W. Smith)
Keith Rowe and Mark Wastell. This last performance balanced the evening well. Louder, more gestura…
The Just Reproach
The Just Reproach documents the second concert given by John Tilbury and Oren Ambarchi as a duo. When they first performed together in Reykjavik, Iceland in March 2012, the aptness of the pairing was evident. When they reprised the duo at London's Cafe OTO in September the same year in the concert presented here, the city was in the midst of a heatwave. With the air-conditioning turned off to accommodate the low volume of the performance, the uncomfortable squirming of the audience members…
Tri-Borough Triptych
Hearing Evan Parker make music with Eddie Prévost, on the first of these three lengthy duets recorded in three different London boroughs, is like watching a pair of tai chi masters sparring. Parker’s tenor and Prévost’s bowed and struck percussion draw buoyancy from each other’s energy as they alternately push and yield. Together they move with feline lightness, agility and balance, even when the music’s mood is stormy and turbulent. The event was Freedom Of The City 2012; the venue, Ceci…
Exta
Finally restocked! "Butcher’s sax ranges from soft, whispery purrs to teeth-chatteringly spiteful blasts. Lehn’s analogue synth leaps in a moment from burbling tones to fiercely sizzling abstraction, and Tilbury slips from his familiar melodic interludes and fragmented arpeggios to crashing, seismic attacks on the inside of the piano. What sets this album head and shoulders above similar offerings is the understanding between the trio. It’s not just the way all three move together as one from su…
Meetings With Remarkable Saxophonists - Volume 3
Jason Yarde, alto and soprano saxophones. Oli Hayhurst, double bass. Eddie Prévost, drums. Recorded at Network Theatre, Waterloo, London on 7th August 2011. "The real discovery is Jason Yarde, and to come in a series after Evan Parker and John Butcher says enough about the esteem Prévost has for the young musician. The quality is obvious. He can shout and scream full of relentless energy, exploring new sonic environments and alternating with very lyrical and calm passages, with phrases and…
Meetings With Remarkable Saxophonists - Volume 4
The fourth volume of Eddie Prevost's 2011 series of concerts at Network Theatre, Waterloo, London meeting with remarkable saxophonists, here with Bertrand Denzler, tenor saxophone, John Edwards, double bass, Eddie Prévost, drums. Recorded at The Network Theatre, Waterloo, on the 12th December 2011. Special thanks to the theatrical custodians of The Network Theatre and especially Keith Wait - for being so positively disposed for this series. Recorded by Giovanni La Rovere. Mixed and edited by Joh…
Making a
Graham Lambkin first heard Keith Rowe's sixties work in AMM as a teenager growing up in Folkestone, a small town in Kent, England, and for him it was very influential. That same year, Lambkin formed his now legendary band The Shadow Ring and Lambkin says, For Darren (Harris) and I, AMM was one of the groups that gave us licence to just do what we wanted, regardless of whether it fitted with convention or employed 'accepted' techniques, and did so from a very English standpoint which held g…
September
This was the much anticipated final set of Keith Rowe's week in NYC, following five duo sets with various collaborators. It took place on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and the Manhattan atmosphere was uniquely charged. As he almost always does, Rowe rose to the challenge of the occasion, creating a moving, dense, and virtuosic set in the lineage of his 2004 set with Burkhard Beins in Berlin (ErstLive 001) and his 2008 solo set in Tokyo (ErstLive 007). The recording quality is remarkable, b…
Cinema
Diverse musical elements - coruscating cymbal scrapes, shimmering amplifier hum, melancholy saxophone circlings, sharp hits of snare, string and reed, slow motion guitar riffs, deep tam-tam surges and floor tom rasps, hypnotic prepared piano figures, and hovering fragments of song-like melodies - fracture and coalesce in this single intense improvisation.
Featuring two of the foundational figures of free improvisation alongside a younger arrival, this recording captures the first meeting …
For Tomasz Sikorski
This release then of three short pieces under ten minutes by the Pole; Autograph (1980), Rondo (1984) and Zertstreutes Hinausschauen (1971) clearly holds some emotional resonance for Tilbury as he reflects on the music of his deceased old friend, and he then adds a fourth track here, a thirteen minute long improvisation in Sikorski's memory. The composed pieces here are each a nice listen, with the opening Autograph possibly the pick, as small flurries of melodic fragment are rotated, so …
Meetings With Remarkable Saxophonists - Volume 2
The second volume of Eddie Prevost's 2011 series of concerts at Network Theatre, Waterloo, London meeting with remarkable saxophonists, here with John Butcher on tenor & soprano, with Guillaume Viltard on double bass. The concerts are also notable as Eddie Prevost returns to the drum kit to extend the function of the basic jazz element into AMM-style improvisation.
Two London Concerts
Restocked, reduced price. Two live recordings by master improvisers John Tilbury (piano) and Eddie Prevost (percussion) playing two emotional sets that are quiet at just the right times and allow for a balanced amount of white space, creating beautiful music. "A new AMM album then, always a welcome arrival, capturing two relatively recent London performances from the duo of Eddie Prévost and John Tilbury. one of which I attended, and the other I could not. Both capture really rather wonderful se…
Christian Wolff / Keith Rowe
In September 2011, Erstwhile producer Jon Abbey was invited to curate two weeks of shows at John Zorn's legendary Manhattan venue The Stone, which he used as an opportunity to invite many of his favorite musicians from Japan, Europe and the US to perform. A second three night festival at Issue Project Room was later appended onto the end, making the AMPLIFY 2011: stones festival a 35 set, 17 night extravaganza in all. Four of those thirty-five sets will now be available in the ErstLive se…
Four Principles On Ireland And Other Pieces (1974)
Having worked closely with Karlheinz Stockhausen during the late 1950s, the Irish-born Cornelius Cardew became a major figure on the European avant-garde music scene over the following decade. However, by the early 1970s Cardew had become deeply involved in the international communist movement which created a growing rift between himself and his colleagues (particularly after his book Stockhausen Serves Imperialism was published in 1974). As Cardew’s politics changed, so did his mu…
Black Plume
Amongst the first generation of innovators in non-idiomatic and non-composed music, Keith Rowe has distinguished himself through his intense collaboration with younger musicians, collaborations that have engaged all involved in processes of reciprocal influence. Rowe has clearly been a teacher, or in his own words a 'permission-maker', for international groups of musicians who (especially in the last twenty years) have taken up his exploration of dislocated instrumental technique, new modes of l…
Impossibility In Its Purest Form
Percussionist Eddie Prévost not only co-founded the British improvising collective AMM more than 45 years ago, he is its chief annotator and its sole consistent member. With these dual roles he has both explained the aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of an enterprise dedicated to constant self-examination and on-stage negotiation, and ensured the music’s immediacy through the agency of his exactingly tuned-in playing. But before he did any of that, he was a fine jazz drummer wit…
Music for Piano and Strings by Morton Feldman. Volume 2
The 2nd volume of "Music for Piano and Strings" by Morton Feldman is performed by The Smith Quartet with John Tilbury, presenting "Patterns In a Chromatic Field", and "Piano, violin, Viola, Cello", on DVD audio to allow for the length of these large works
Several lifetimes ago, when I was nineteen, I was interviewed by Wilfrid Mellers for a place at York University. That I failed to win a place may have been due in part to the confinement of our discussions to the music of Morton Feldman. Wilfr…
Field
"The Koeln concert shows us these positive vibrations marching through "the complete continuance of creative music," and on towards the next millennium. The "success of the future" is not a lost cause as long as there is music like this in the air."-Graham Lock"Although Anthony Braxton does not play on this double CD (whose contents were released for the first time in 1995), his presence is certainly felt. He conducts the band through a fairly free improvisation and five of his compositio…
Concentration of the Stare
Spend any amount of time in the company of Keith Rowe and the names of certain painters will arise in conversation with some frequency. Caravaggio, Twombly and, among others, most definitely, Mark Rothko. Just as, long ago, he'd imagined what the guitars in Braque's cubist painting might actually sound like, so, I think, he did with Rothko, often referring to the way the "tinged" the space in which they were hung. For some time, in the early oughts, Rowe tried to place his music in a similar are…
We Sing For The Future & Thamann Variations
Recorded in 2002 by American contemporary composer and pianist, Frederic Rzewski, We Sing For The Future & Thälmann Variations are two compositions from English composer Cornelius Cardew’s Marxist-influenced 'People’s Liberation Music' period. Rzewski came to prominence in the mid-sixties in Rome as a founding member of the MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) improvisation group (along with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum), which shared a vision with groups like Cornelius Ca…