AMM

Fine is the record of a concert AMM gave with the dancer Fine Kwiatkowski at the Musique Action festival in Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy on 24 May 2001. It came about a year after the Glasgow set issued as Tunes Without Measure or End. The dancer is silent on the recording, so what remains is the music made for and around her movement, quiet and sombre for most of its length. It plays as a single continuous piece of nearly an hour, divided into seven parts only for ease of access.

The trio is John Tilbury on piano, Keith Rowe on electric guitar and Eddie Prévost on percussion, recorded by François Cacic and François Dietz for the festival produced by CCAM. Stuart Broomer, reviewing it in Coda in 2002, heard the opening section as "mechanical, harsh". The piano enters warily before Tilbury's metallic sweeps across the strings join the feedback and percussion. Brian Olewnick, in the All Music Guide, noted that Prévost keeps almost entirely to rubbed and stroked surfaces, rarely producing anything that sounds struck. He and Rowe build long, complex drones that are unsettling for all their low volume. Tilbury mostly sidesteps his familiar Feldman-like playing, working inside the instrument or offering melodic fragments that recall Debussy. In the closing minutes the sound swells into a hum that fills the hall and then recedes. Broomer set it beside the Glasgow concert to make the point that two AMM performances a year apart can sound entirely unlike each other.

Released by Matchless Recordings in 2001 as MRCD 46, a single CD with front cover artwork by Keith Rowe.