AMM

Place sub. v. is an hour-long concert by AMM as a duo, pianist John Tilbury and percussionist Eddie Prévost, recorded in Poland in 2012. The title borrows the abbreviations of a dictionary entry (place, substantive and verb), and Prévost's liner note traces the word back to Latin and Greek roots meaning open space. Place has always mattered to AMM, whose records are often named after the rooms they were made in. Here it becomes the subject: how each sound is placed against the others, against the hall and against silence. It was released ten years after Keith Rowe left the group in 2004.

The concert was recorded on 16 May 2012 at CODES, the Festival of Traditional and Avant-garde Music in Lublin, and runs one hour, one minute and one second as a single track. It opens on a dark, rumbling piano chord and ends with the decay of a bowed tam-tam. In between, Tilbury's clangorous chords, starkly struck notes and preparations inside the piano meet Prévost's surface abrasions, pin-point metallic textures and bowed cymbals, building slow arcs of tension that open into pools of stasis. In the duo Tilbury takes a more active role than in the old trio, and Prévost stays almost entirely off the drum set, working with gongs, bowed metal and wooden objects. Michael Rosenstein, in Point of Departure (2014), called it one of the strongest statements of the duo since then. The Wire (2014) noted a pensive mood, at times close to gamelan, at others carrying foreboding, and summed it up as "powerful, humane and uncomfortable music".

Published by Matchless Recordings in 2014 as MRCD 91 (CD), recorded by Jaroslaw Rudnicki, mixed and edited by Sebastian Lexer, with a text by Prévost.