Eddie Prévost, John Tilbury

Discrete Moments brings two members of AMM together outside the group. John Tilbury plays piano, prepared piano and organ, and Eddie Prévost adds a stringed barrel, a tam-tam and other percussion to his drum kit. The disc runs about seventy-five minutes in eight sections whose single-letter titles spell the word discrete in shuffled order. It keeps the patient, attentive listening of AMM, but the organ and the unusual percussion take the duo to places the group rarely visits, from near-silence to sudden full volume. For Ken Waxman, who reviewed it in Jazzword in 2004, the result was "not so much reductionist as a reorientation of the AMM style".

The session was recorded at Gateway Studios in Kingston upon Thames on 6 January 2004, with Steve Lowe as engineer. The longest piece, R, lasts almost nineteen minutes, with wavering drones that slowly settle into acoustic timbres over cymbal hiss and cross-chording. On T the buzz of the tam-tam meets organ pedal tones that thicken like an approaching storm. On I Tilbury opens up both manuals of the organ, a high reedy line above a sustained pedal point, while Prévost scrapes and ratchets underneath. The stringed barrel gives Prévost percussive and string sounds at once: he stretches and snaps the cord, and the hollow body adds its own resonance. Tilbury's piano ranges from high arpeggios with glissandi to prepared-piano chords over a left-hand ostinato, and silence is as much part of the material as sound.

Released by Matchless Recordings in 2004 as MRCD 58, a CD with Roadwork (2002) by Brenda Mayo on the front cover.