Articulate noises – AMM and MEV, separate and together
"Even inarticulate noises do indeed reveal something" – Aristotle
How to begin writing about a music that might begin anywhere? Perhaps by saying so.
I am. We are.
That is enough. Now we have to begin.
And if that is how Ernst Bloch begins The Spirit of Utopia, a book containing, suggestively, a lengthy essay on ‘The Philosophy of Music’, it can only be almost as worrying to encounter, in an essay by Adorno on the same topic, the dispiriting suggestion that "music gazes at its listener with empty eyes".
Fortunately the music of AMM or MEV is by no means empty; though it might seem an empty gesture to be yoking the two groups together. They seem at first glance to share little beyond longevity, each having a history extending for four decades; that, and the fact that they were once on opposite sides of a long-vanished vinyl LP. Both their histories and the consequent musics are very different. AMM’s membership has been by and large stable; it has had the same line-up as is on these CDs for a quarter of a century. It has been rare for more than a year or two to pass without some aural documentation of what they’re up to (albeit in some cases issued decidedly retrospectively). Musica Elettronica Viva, to give them their full name, have not merely had many personnel – given their solicitation of audience participation, their full playing complement would be unlistable thousands – but there have been different versions of MEV operating in different countries, even continents, producing albums with markedly different, even incompatible, aesthetics. Their music, as far as one can gauge it from the scant half-dozen available recordings - and decades have passed with no licit releases – is more expansive (as one would expect, given their broader performance practice) and with, particularly recently, a markedly hospitable approach to musics from other places and times; AMM, in contrast, might be thought, particularly in the last 25 years or so, to be more introspective, with the music immediate, self-generated, even autotelic. (The use Keith Rowe makes of the radio during performances neatly skewers this over-easy generalisation.) It is a delight, then, that what might have been over-enthusiastic festival programming has produced music of substance and excellence; ‘live electronic music, improvised’, which both has a kinship with their shared album of that title, now nearly forty years old, and is also unlike anything else either group has recorded previously. This is both the music that existed, unheard, between the opposed sides of that old Mainstream album, and a music that is utterly without precedent.
One reason for the ‘newness’ of both AMM and MEV in the mid-60s was the speed of their take-up of new technologies - if that term isn’t too hi-falutin’, given the levels of bricolage involved. AMM were pioneers of the use of the radio as an instrument (for which the now-deceased composer-improviser, Cornelius Cardew, an early member of the group, found a precedent in Cage’s 1951 Imaginary Landscape No. 4.) More important for both groups, however, was the example of the pianist-turned-live-electronics pioneer, David Tudor. His conviction that the circuit diagrams and wiring layouts constituted scores was something of a blow to a compositional aesthetic, particularly given his renown as a pianist-interpreter. Frederic Rzewski apparently spent some time in Buffalo, NY, during which he heard Tudor perform, even stayed with him. In spring 1966 Rzewski came back to Rome (where MEV was founded and based) with some cheap contact mikes and mixers and some discarded circuitry formerly the property of the inventor/performer/composer David Behrman; these were hooked up with bed-springs, glass plates, rubber bands, tin cans, toy pianos, sex vibrators, assorted metal junk, et the obligatory cetera…. Cardew tells us that around 1968 AMM were exploring the range of small sounds made available by contact microphones on all kinds of material – glass, metal, wood, etc. – and a variety of gadgets from drumsticks to battery-operated cocktail mixers. In a time when live electronic improvisation is so common that it not only has sub-genres but even an ‘original instruments’ tendency, it is worth recollecting just how original this was – for MEV in particular. Their undersung founder member Allan Bryant heavily rewired a cheap electric organ, adding switchable resistors and capacitors to the outside of the instrument. As well as working with the first ‘R.A. Moog music synthesizer’ in Europe, Richard Teitelbaum pioneered techniques of manipulating its signals using heart-beat, brain-waves and variations in skin resistance. All of which echoes Adorno’s contention that the correct way to think of a composer’s musical material – even an instant composer’s – is as the technical productive forces of an age, concretised. This is material not as inert lump, but stuff that has not yet become something; or is still in the process of doing so. Although a period’s technology need not drive its music, it cannot but shape it, often in ways which are far from evident. Bloch observed that the ancient Greeks would not have understood calculus, as, lacking microscopy, they could not have conceived of the subdividability of basic units and elements. (An observation with more relevance to the music on these CDs than might at first be apparent.)
At each new step new immediacy emerges. That, more or less, is Hegel, paraphrased by Adorno. And, arguably, it also describes non-idiomatic free improvisation, whose ‘past’, as it passes, is accidental, contingent, no matter how intentional, or unavoidable, hindsight or successful resolution might make it seem. To remake anew every instant in this manner must involve risk. The poet Douglas Oliver explored this notion contemplating a poem by J.H. Prynne, and suggested that "What there is in potential, if we could only place ourselves without fear and in full emotional risk at the total disposal of the next instant when we shall act, is the possibility of true, real action, that will get the actions right". (It might be observed that such a prospect alone is sufficient to make this music social, even political.) Though this is a music of the moment, it is not held in that moment. If we grant the contention on the sleeve of the first AMM album that "every noise has a note", it is also true, as Adorno maintains, that notes don’t exist, they function: "In music nothing has the right to follow anything else unless it has been determined by what precedes it or, conversely, unless it reveals ex post facto that what has preceded it was, in reality, its own precondition". The point of a note, or a noise, in a shaped sonic environment is that it leads from; and leads to. There is relationship, there are perhaps even systems of relationship; and there should be reciprocity. Despite the surface appropriateness of Evan Parker’s description of AMM’s music as ‘laminar’, there is always progression within these layers, always a forward unfolding in time.
N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, my source for Douglas Oliver’s remarks on instantaneity, open their discussion of the poetry of Prynne by considering ‘Questions of Scale’. It is their contention that poetry, perhaps more than the other arts, has found it hard to represent events beyond the scale of direct, individual perception – events too large and slow to be observed – such as geological processes of formation and dissolution, or too small and quick, such as the movement of molecules or the immediate reaction of nerve-cells. Even to call these things ‘events’ is to suggest that they can be seen clearly and whole, delineated against their surroundings, whereas, in relation to the ‘events’ which can be witnessed by individual narrators, they are processes without beginning or end. These processes constitute ourselves, and the things we see. They are going on ‘inside’ things, as if beneath the earth’s surface. They are the movement of what to us seems ‘static’.
I would hope that the reference to the relationship of movement and stasis, and the consideration of long durations, would show why I find this passage important (we might note in passing that this planet’s annual attainment of apogee is something lived through but scarcely grasped). But it is worth looking at the fuller context, not least because of the implicit move beyond the immediately (and traducibly) human, as Reeve and Kerridge go on to assert:
individual lives may be subsumed in these processes, if the processes are large-scale, and broken down into them, if they are small-scale. Such processes constitute the organic world from which
the human subject […] emerges, and from which ‘events’ on the human scale emerge. But if the
processes themselves are to emerge […] they will displace the human subject…
While I was thinking about the writing of these notes, someone else’s radio came on:
Trying to find the magic
Trying to write a classic
Don’t you know, don’t you know, don’t you know?
Wastebin full of paper
Clever rhymes, see you later
These words are my own
From my heart flown
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
Even the language of inarticulate authenticity can be articulated and made inauthentic; for a truly human music it has apparently become necessary, as for Prynne in poetry, to move beyond the usual models of scale. To listen not to the heart, but to the amplified heart-beat. To hear not "these words", but their scarcely audible rumble from a radio not quite on station, taking us to other worlds. With the development of digital sampling, scraps of sound can be held, magnified, extended, pitch-shifted; permitting, as Reeve and Kerridge’s example posits, "studying intently, and opening out indefinitely, the space between two millimetre marks on a ruler". We are in the domain of Blake’s (or Prévost’s!) "minute particulars" which is where art exists, rather than in "generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power", the power of the marketplace which has so thoroughly colonised the ‘middle ground’ with commodified and administered music. Outside, the way is left open for macro-processes and micro-processors to tell us more about the world we’re in, the world that’s within us, and the world we might (re-) make with one another. As I said earlier, this music is social and ethical; heard aright, it could
subvert that "unwritten musical score" which Pierre Bourdieu thought organized all our actions, however much we believe we are improvising our own melodies.
Of course, this music is made by human beings for human beings; and so it is not inhuman. Indeed, it can be almost banally everyday. Adorno says "you need only turn the knobs on the dial of a radio at random"; and any time Keith Rowe moves his finger, as he did at around twenty past two on the afternoon of May the First 2004 in the Conway Hall in London, we might get, as we did, pulsing with increasing intensity through the continuing wash of sound, an insistent, mechanized beat; an emotive voice repeating insistently a far-from-special phrase; and the sudden irruption of a DJ reading out a message from a listener: "I’m so bored I’m revising for my SATS". (Standard Assessment Tests are taken at rather too frequent intervals by UK school pupils.) Rowe’s cut-off returns us to the interior of the Conway Hall, but reminds us that outside it are a wider group of listeners to music, a wider range of music, and a wider range of reasons – not all of them good - for listening. This epiphany (if that’s what it is) offers neither consolation nor confirmation, accommodates a critique and proffers one, equally. Prynne is apposite: "Rubbish is / pertinent; essential; the / most intricate presence in / our entire culture".
I won’t discuss further here what is implicit in Rowe’s use of the radio, not least as he has already done so incisively himself. I want instead to consider the use made of sampling, which might well seem paradoxical in a music usually conceived of as made-in-the-moment and unprecedented, also as non-idiomatic and non-referential. Alvin Curran, in an interview a day or two before these recordings, explained..
"there's another area where I've carried my electronics over directly out of the MEV period.
And that's been reduced now to the almost exclusive use of an 88 note MIDI keyboard, a sampler and using thousands of samples of music from all over the world and I keep changing it and refreshing it. […] It's a solo performance machine exactly. And that is completely unpredictable music. Wherever you put your finger you don't know whether
you're going to get a market in Bombay or James Brown or whatever. Anything can come up.
And ‘anything’ did; the Tchaikovsky violin concerto; Frank Sinatra singing "I’ve got the world on a string"; some operatic vocal ululations; south-east Asian folk zither; Harry Partch’s The Letter…. " The technique of putting things together comes to determine the form", as Adorno wrote of his proposed musique informelle. As we might expect, given the oppositions of micro- and macro- , there are (perhaps irreconcilable) oppositions here too; as Curran put it in 1995, "All music starts anew each time, as if there had never been any music before it", but "Musical remembering and musical amnesia are of equal value - in short one could build on past or conditioned experience or try to forget everything ever known". I’m not particularly interested in trying to decide whether this is theoretically acceptable; much of the debate about the legitimacy of the use of samples is beset with entrenched prior positions and frankly too tedious to rehearse here. More intriguing, on an analogy with Prévost’s postulated ‘meta-musicians’, is what one might term ‘meta-sampling’, the citation of other or previous modes of playing. When – or if – this happens is of course open to debate; in the absence of specific confirmation from the musician/s, it remains unprovably conjectural. There may or may not be a lineage leading back from Eddie Prévost’s tam-tam work to Microphonie 1; it may or may not be the case, as has been asserted, that the Stockhausen piece is a weak aestheticisation of La Monte Young’s earlier Studies in The Bowed Disc; it is self-evident that any cause-and-effect linking, though it might give some intellectual pleasure, is not logically necessary. (Whatever one’s stance on this, Prévost’s tam-tam playing on the studio double-trio is ceaselesly inventive, and only a fool would get distracted by arguments over origins.) Yet despite this caveat, I believe I’m right to locate meta-sampling in both ensembles; and not to fret about it. Let me offer examples. It has become a listeners’ cliché to hear Morton Feldman in John Tilbury’s playing with AMM. Of course, only a lazy ear would find repetitions or hear borrowings. Tilbury’s improvisatory playing is if anything richer; his immensely meticulous and ever-varied voicing of chords, different at every turn, would be almost impossible to notate without generating score-pages of unwieldy complexity. What we are perhaps right to hear is allusion to a shared sensibility, an evident feel for mood, tempo, the right right notes placed where they belong, with due finesse. In a parallel manner I hear referentiality in Rzewski’s playing; not to pieces for the piano, but to pianism. What he alludes to is not the standard piano repertoire, its fossilized (or petrifying) ‘standards’, but the inherited traditions of piano playing. One can (arguably) hear a ‘Frenchness’, refracted through the American conservatoire teaching tradition which, historically speaking, drew upon French models. Although this audible heritage might, to some, carry the stamp of ‘high’ culture, in fact it represents something that can’t be commodified; it is transmitted orally - indeed literally digitally. Rzewski dances among styles of piano-playing as nimbly as Curran among genres. They could not stand more wholly in opposition to postmodern pastiche (as identified by Fredric Jameson):
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter".
Tilbury or Rzewski’s allusions to physical modes of playing have in common with Curran’s and Rowe’s transumptions or bringings-across of the soundworlds of other (sub-) cultures a context of re-shaping; a shaping which re-contextualises. Somewhere between these two zones we might encounter Teitelbaum invoking 50s-style studio electronics, or Sun Ra, or even fairground Wurlitzer, brashly yet delicately parrying with the more pristine sound of the organ as played by Tilbury in the studio double-trio.
As Adorno remarks in Aesthetic Theory, what resurfaces through correspondences with the past becomes something qualitatively other; an idea glossed provocatively in his ‘Vers une musique informelle’ when he suggests that abstract forms, internal compositional categories, formally expelled from ‘informal music’, will surface again in the innermost recesses of the particular event and set them alight. Lest this sound like rodomontade, let me offer a concrete example. After the generally low dynamic levels and relatively slow pace of the AMM trio set on 1 May, the MEV trio opened with the blast of Alvin Curran playing the shofar, a trumpet made from a ram’s horn, a ‘defiantly primitive’, prototypical music, fit to leave the walls of the Conway Hall, like some new Jericho, pitched down flat. If I spoke earlier of the way in which AMM might deal, in Reeve and Kerridge’s phrase, with the internal, microscopically-enlarged body surface which becomes a landscape – and the same is true of some of Teitelbaum and Curran’s quieter use of radically pitch-shifted and extended samples – particularly that ululating operatic-theatrical voice, coming to sound almost like something from AMM’s label-mates FURT - then this is the extrovert mode, which refuses any easy accommodations. Which division is inherent; as Bourdieu explains, the culture which unifies via the medium of communication is also the culture which separates via the culture of distinction, and which legitimates distinctions. It may be, as Adorno remarks, that a work of art is great insofar as it registers a failed attempt to reconcile such objective antinomies; failure then being in the highest sense the measure of success. Certainly such terminology is not new to AMM, who, circa 1970, quoted approvingly a journalist on Peace News writing that "Ultimately, however, AMM fails". They went on to concur: "Ultimately AMM will fail. There may be rare moments when we, or others, sense a kind of success, but there can never be ‘ultimate’ success. Nevertheless, with the kind of perversity that really belongs only to nature, AMM continues to play". We can, however, turn this pessimism – if pessimism it be – on its head. The search amounts also to a refusal to sit still; there is for neither AMM nor MEV any sort of metaphysics of the present; nor of presence. For either ensemble what has already been played – by others or themselves – is always new. The already-known, the found or sampled, is, as we have seen, qualitatively other when re-positioned; and it is the distance between these (again incompatible) realities which is, says Bloch, difficult and astonishing. We know what we hear, but we don’t know it; in Aristotle’s or Bloch’s, term, anagnorisis – recognition, rather than recollection – is linked with reality by only a thin thread; it is therefore alarming. And if we do know what’s coming, the same thing happens. In Bloch’s phrase, "what is wished for arrives, it surprises us anyway". What is yet to come, Ernst Bloch’s ‘not–yet’, is also always new. He tells us, "We live surrounded by possibility, not merely by presence. In the prison of mere presence we could not even move, nor even breathe." In the domain of music, this is that musique informelle which Adorno so adroitly skirts round defining, but which will, evidently, be the idea (Vorstellung) of something not yet imagined (vorgestellt).
I began in wondering how one might start writing about a music that might itself start anywhere; and it appears that it might lead anywhere, too. Bloch detected – and valued - something ‘unconcluded’ in music, which answered his preference for the potential, the ‘not-yet’ that is always about to arrive - and which, of course, free improvisation at its best can offer. A site for the non-specific yet highly-specific, for hope as yet not concretised. As, however, you are holding nearly two-and-a-half hours of remarkable music in your hands, this should end this with another site for hope, poetry (once again, that of J.H. Prynne): "music is truly the / sound of our time, since it is how we most / deeply recognise the home we may not / have".
Harry Gilonis
Acknowledgements
I found the Douglas Oliver quotation in N.H. Reeve & Richard Kerridge’s 1995 Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne; the two poems of his I quote briefly from can be found in full in his 1999 Poems, pp. 100 and 162. Fredric Jameson on ‘pastiche’ occurs in the initial, originating chapter of his 1991 Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Discussion of meta-musicianship and the ethics of sampling, plus much else that is pertinent, can be found in Edwin Prévost’s two books (available from Matchless) No Sound is Innocent and Minute Particulars. I’ve drawn, amongst other works by both writers, on Ernst Bloch’s massive Principle of Hope, and both Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and his essay on ‘musique informelle’ in Quasi Una Fantasia.
What I’ve seen of John Tilbury’s work-in-progress on Cornelius Cardew, and Alvin Curran’s Selected Writings (seemingly published only digitally: , clarified some historical details; Keith Rowe’s 1997 ‘Above and Beyond’ appeared in Resonance Vol. 5 no. 2, and is also found at . That, and ‘Mass Ornaments’, a 2004 interview with Alvin Curran made on the occasion of the recordings herein, findable in full at
(the basis of a shorter article in The Wire issue no. 249, Nov. 2004), were informative about current activity. I’ve also listened a lot; mostly to the music of AMM and MEV, but also to Richard Barrett, Clive Graham, Elizabeth James, Paul Obermayer and Ian Pace. These words are for them.
Founded in London in the mid-60s, AMM is unquestionably the longest-running band devoted to free collective improvisation. As befits a group devoted to spontaneous creation, it has often been in flux, although from 1980 to 2004 it maintained a core personnel of percussionist Eddie Prévost, guitarist Keith Rowe (two founding members), and pianist John Tilbury.
Apogee chronicles both a first-time meeting of AMM and MEV (Musica Eletronnica Viva), and one of the last performances of that longest-running version of AMM. It's a two-CD set. The first CD is a studio recording of the two groups together; the second pairs performances by each individual group: a thirty-nine-minute piece by AMM entitled 01.05.04, and a thirty-six-minute piece by MEV, also entitled 01.05.04 (perhaps mere date, but also May Day), both recorded at London's Freedom of the City Festival. MEV includes Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. The CD (no doubt quite deliberately) doesn't list the musicians' instruments, though not because they're self-evident: you'll likely have difficulty sorting out the parts. Each group includes a virtuoso pianist (Tilbury and Rzewski) whose improvising style takes in the instrument's vocabulary as redefined by Cage and Feldman. Curran is employing a sampling keyboard and Teitelbaum a synthesizer, while AMM's use of close miking, electronics, and bowed cymbals and guitar can thoroughly disguise the sound sources. Trying to sort out identities is certainly one way of listening, but I think it misses the point. An alternative method might be that of poet Harry Gilonis' liner notes—an intense politico-philosophical discourse involving Bloch, Adorno, Jameson, and the writings of Prévost and Curran (a method perhaps best suited to musicians who can write the same language and who are, in effect, sponsoring it). This ardent intellectualizing is germane to a music in which the political histories of the musicians loom so large (Rzewski's compositions include The People United Can Never Be Defeated; Rowe once departed AMM to form the rock band People's Liberation Music). In a sense, this music is preoccupied with the potential of the collective to arrive at a piece that is a kind of abstract consensus—though perhaps heard as aerial map or tectonic history. It is noteworthy that each group has a member who specializes in the intrusion of the world—Rowe by means of radio; Curran by means of sampler (in the sextet: I've got the world on a string…; the MEV piece begins dramatically with Curran playing a shafar, a trumpet made from a ram's horn, but the notes fail to say if he's playing it with his mouth or via sampling). The sextet performance (and, for that matter, the two trios) has the deliberateness and the formal inevitability of classical music, a term here used as period specific to describe the elementary shuffling of harmonic blocks in early Haydn or the political allegories of Mozart or Beethoven. The pieces are realized as their own deconstructions, and if we experience sound as liberated, that freedom may arise in the very complex ambiguation of motives. Ultimately, the music is a triumph of the spontaneous and collective: there are moments of such gorgeous, gradually evolving, dense, sonic beauty that they demand to be heard.
Stuart Broomer
Music Works 04/11/2006
In 1966, as AMM began their attempts to scale walls of sound in London, Musica Elettronica Viva formed in Rome. MEV's three American avant garde composers, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum "rejected all forms of hierarchy, all forms of organisation, all forms of leadership", as Curran told Phil England last year in The WIre 249. "No director, no score, no knowledge of when the music might begin or end… It was erasing our whole background, everything we were supposed to be, everything we were supposed to do and basically our whole cultural mission in life." Their utopian improvised score 'Spacecraft', designed to raise themselves and their audience to a zone of new consciousness where revolutionary zeal might actually gain some traction, calls to mind Buckmlnster Fuller's 'Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth', written In 1963. Fuller opens with a statement about finding the correct form for whatever task you have in mind: if you are caught in a shipwreck and there's no room on a life raft, then a piano lid might serve the same purpose. But the best way to design a life preserver from scratch is not necessarily to start with a piano lid shape, ImprovIsing with the tools at hand can help, but you might not end up with something that's universally acceptable. And there it is; free improvisation's dilemma in a nutshell.
'Apogee' chronicles a historic meeting, documenting both groups on two consecutive days in May 2004, the first improvising as a coalition in the studio, the second performing as separate factions in front of a live audience at London's 'Freedom Of The City Festival'. This could have been issued as two separate CDs of each group, but this particular two day spate was always conceived as a double act. Players of this generation, where cooperation and coexistence are absolute imperatives, wouldn't call this a 'soundclash'. Instead the model is MEV's notion of the 'soundpool': an unsupervised field with the gates left open, Each ticking second holds the potential for total change, for renewal and revolution. It can't be an easy music or mindset to sustain, but these are the finest players of this improvisatory mode, and 'Apogee' contains some of the best music any of them has ever put on record.
The studio date took place at Gateway in South London, and is carved up in three sections entitled 'Apogee Parts: 1-3'. For the opening 18 minutes the two groups sound like behemoths lumbering into action, cyclopean denizens blinking in the light, with a tentativeness typical of this mode of communal, altruistic exploration. Then Eddie Prévost introduces some incredible bowed cymbal resembling a wailing child, which seems to draw the others into a more focused mutual project. MEV are essentially now a keyboard trio — piano and two synths —-and their subtle deployment frames much of the acoustic activity (Curran keeps an array of devices at his disposal, including horns, finger percussion and plastic tweety birds).
Apogee usually signifies 'the highest farthest point'; its original meaning derives from astronomy, referring to the point at which an orbiting body is furthest from its gravitational centre. Should we read into this that these groups, or certain Individuals within them, now find themselves at divergent points after a lifetime in orbit around each other,? AMM have increasingly been about playing against silence. MEV were always a more noisy proposition, and here the twin synthesizers of Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum provide a much more active noise floor than AMM ever utilise. The close pairing is instructive, as it's possible to hear the two groups' discrete methods. For example. MEV deal in longer developmental arcs, lingering among the drones and textures from their synths, punctured by peculiar interventions such as Teitelbaum's abstract whispering, or Curran's amateurish parps on his hunting horn. With AMM there's a stronger sense that at any moment something will drastically change: a segment of barely audible sonic glimmer might be capsized with the beat of a drum or an inappropriate explosion of Muzak or Grime from Keith Rowe's radio set. There seems little space for pianists Tilbury and Rzewski, who interject and irrupt rather than drive the narrative. But there are points where the groups melt and gel in spectacular style, In 'Apogee Part Two' there's a thrilling duet as Prévost shadows Curran's horn with his horsehaired cymbal; 'Part Three' is a more evenly balanced electroacoustic conversation in which Rowe and Prévost rise to the provocation of MEV's weird 70s space sounds.
The live date was the opening event of London's 'Freedom Of The City' Festival, and perversely this historic pairing was programmed during an afternoon slot. MEV begin with a feisty fanfare and appear to relish their 40 minutes. Rzewski trundling out the odd classical or bluesy lick, They draw on a bank of samples including ethnic stringed instruments, which can occasionally feel like a naff 'musical journey', but they proceed with a palette and pace that's unlike anyone else in Improv at the moment, all the more extraordinary for their lack of regular meeting.
AMM's jive set begins testily with Tilbury stabbing at each extreme of his ivories and Keith Rowe pumping belching FX hum and interfering obscenely with his guitar innards. With the hindsight that, shortly after this show, Prévost published a book that took strong issue with the playing methods and attitude of guitarist Keith Rowe, I can't help but hear conflict and argument enacted during this recording, though I don't remember it being so apparent during the actual set. After 24 minutes Prévost answers Rowe's grunting strings by striking reports on an upturned cymbal; Details are aggrandized on CD that were soaked up by the hall's wood paneling, principally Rowe's radiophonic interruptions of repetitive beats from pirate stations and shout-outs from tower block DJs. In a piece lasting nearly 40 minutes, Rowe has faded himself out before half an hour has expired, and the last four minutes are spun out by Tilbury alone, pedaling on the bottom notes in a downward drift into a penetrating, loaded silence in which grudges hover unspoken. The final pages of the operating manual are left blank, for notes.
**** Apogee
A historic encounter. No other improvising ensemble has explored the philosophy of sound and its techniques more thoroughly than Musica Ellecttronica Viva. By contrast to AMM's substantial archive of recordings, MEV is only sparsely documented, partly because the group's membership and ethos has changed so radically over the decades. The key elements in this configuration are Rzewski's classically aware and thoroughly Europeanized pianism (very different to Tilbury's which ironically draws more from American examples) and Teitelbaum's virtuosic use of synthesizers.
On the last day of April and the first day of May 2004, AMM/MEV first made a studio recording as a collective and then played separately as part of the 'Freedom of the City' festival in London. The three studio improvisations are unmistakably not the work of either ensemble alone, though parsing the differences takes some effort. As ever, it is pointless trying to determine who is playing what. Prévost's percussion effects and Rowe's tabletop abstractions and outbreaks of radio noise sometimes emerge from the mix; Teitelbaum has a liking for shimmering figures of great harmonic complexity. Beyond that, it is not worthwhile to explore; the encounter generates a hugely involved synthesis in which elements of both groups seem to remain intact but inseparable from the whole.
We'd recommend listening to the live sets first, not just to establish contact with MEV's less familiar improvisational language (check out Curran's huge opening blasts on the Hebrew shohar) but because the quiet drama of the collaboration only makes complete sense after one has sampled the more linear approach of the Americans. A long, demanding listen, but packed with astonishing music. Even if only as a historical document Apogee is worth having.