AMM

Spanish Fighters is a single 37 minute improvisation by AMM in its duo form, pianist John Tilbury and percussionist Eddie Prévost. The title is the name of the hall where it was recorded, Španski Borci in Ljubljana, named after the Yugoslav volunteers who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Both players took that history to heart on the night. Reviewing it in 2016 for Squidco, Brian Olewnick called it the seventh release by this incarnation of AMM and "arguably the best". By 2012, he wrote, the pair left behind after the departure of Keith Rowe worked as a seamless unit.

The concert took place on 16 November 2012 during the festival Neposlušno (Sound Disobedience), organised by Zavod Sploh. The music begins with liquid piano sonorities and bowed tam-tam and moves in widening arcs punctuated by silence, the soft opening returning at the close. Prévost spends much of it bowing cymbals and drawing moans from the bass drum skin; Tilbury plays quietly but with emphasis, widely spaced notes alternating with long stretches inside the instrument. Marc Medwin, in The New York City Jazz Record, heard shades of Scriabin and Bill Evans in the chords and a swung pulse slipping into Prévost's harder passages. Olewnick found the mood bleak and subdued, as if coloured by the place's name, until a passage of delicate sounds from the keyboard near the end brings a sense of momentary deliverance. In Dusted, Bill Meyer wrote that the music is "mostly empty, but filled with potential power", like an atom.

Published by Matchless Recordings in 2015 as MRCD 94 (CD), recorded by Iztok Zupan and mastered by Rupert Clervaux, with notes by Prévost. It comes in an outsized gatefold card sleeve with a four-page booklet.