AMM

An Unintended Legacy documents the trio version of AMM, John Tilbury on piano, Keith Rowe on electric guitar and Eddie Prévost on percussion. Rowe had rejoined the group in autumn 2015, eleven and a half years after leaving, for its fiftieth anniversary concert at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In the following months the three played four concerts, and the first three fill a disc each here. The set is dedicated to saxophonist Lou Gare, who had founded AMM with Prévost and Rowe in 1965 and died in October 2017, while it was being prepared.

The concerts took place at Café Oto in London on 5 December 2015 and at the Église St-Merry in Paris on 7 April 2016. The third was given in Trondheim on 9 June 2016, at a festival devoted to Cornelius Cardew. Writing in The Squid's Ear, John Eyles found the trio picking up where it had stopped in 2004, with no tentative reacquaintance. Each voice is instantly recognisable: Tilbury's spare arpeggios and sudden crashing chords, the sustained ring of Prévost's bowed cymbals and gong, Rowe's sampled fragments of pop, the Beach Boys included. He stressed how much the three nights differ, because AMM concerts never start in a set way. In Point of Departure, Michael Rosenstein described the London disc moving in waves and the Paris set opening with a sharp crack, then keeping its restraint. Trondheim is the sparest of the three, ending as the piano lid comes down. Eyles called the album "definitely one of 2018's best" (2018).

Published by Matchless Recordings in 2018 as MRCD 97, on three CDs with a seventy-page book. It includes an AMM discography and texts by Prévost, Rowe, Paige Mitchell and Allen Fisher, Harry Gilonis, and Seymour Wright on Gare.