Liner Notes

This music speaks for itself. So any attempt at characterization should be hedged with a warning that it might deflect the listener’s attention. The very fact of the attempt supposes the pre eminence of ‘character’. In Epilogue , one of his Essays Before A Sonata, Charles Ives made a strong case for what he called ‘substance.’ Substance, he wrote, “has something to do with character.” But what of sheer beauty? For Ives, ‘beauty’ was a problematical concept: “We like the beautiful and don’t like the ugly: therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don’t like is ugly - and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were we would like something we don’t like. So having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.” Ives contrasted ‘substance’ with ‘manner’ which “breeds a cussed cleverness only to be clever (a satellite of super industrialism) and perhaps to be witty in the bargain - not the wit in mother wit, but a kind of indoor, artificial, mental arrangement of things quickly put together which have to be learned and studied.”

Well, there is nothing mannered about AMM. In place of the ‘indoor’ and the ‘artificial’, we discover breath taking openness and inventiveness. The sound of AMM is preterhumanly spacious and it makes sense to characterize this music less in human terms (as ‘lively’ and ‘graceful’, for example) than in terms of landscape. However, any landscape suggested by an AMM improvisation is light years from the affectively pastoral. It is akin perhaps to the paradoxically abstract landscapes of musique concrete.

This writer’s own description, written for his own benefit, of the recorded performance in Newfoundland frequently resorts to Arctic and aquatic imagery. So there are dangers in knowing even a little! It is surely too easy to resort to adjectives such as ‘rumbling’, ‘juddering’, ‘thudding’, rippling’ and ‘growling.’ This music is so stunningly immediate, so palpable, that it makes a nonsense of such musings.

Howard Skempton September 1993.

review 1 Biba Kopf The Wire

It might not be the role they aspire towards, but AMM are like the Holy Spirit of contemporary music. Whether their presence was noted or not, their Holy Spirit has somehow laid its touch on early English psychedelia and the late English oddness of the likes of Nurse With Wound, the variously extreme noise tests of Einstürzende Neubauten and primetime Sonic Youth, and lately, the soiled ambiences at the more interesting end of a increasingly tedious trend towards Techno silence.

So, AMM's essence spills over the entire waterfront from noise to silence, and its influence seeps into the most disparate and irreconcilable of factions, in the process dissolving their contradictions. If this makes AMM sound like supreme shapeshifters or some sort of chameleon capable of harmonising with any hip scene you care to mention, then I should point out that AMM are never less than recognisable as AMM. Quite an acheivement for a group dedicated to the idea that there is no such thing as a right or wrong sound. If that makes it all sound a little too easy and laissez-faire, the character that has distinguished AMM from the rest os their commitment to making something of such a superficially simple, but in practice extraordinarily difficult idea. It has held good from AMMMUSIC 1966 through to Newfoundland, recorded in1992, with the current line-up of Eddie Prévost, John Tilbury and Keith Rowe.

Without the spectator element of AMM live, where you can see how the percussionist, pianist and guitarist respectively beat, stroke, cajole an seduce sounds out of their instruments, the resultant music gets ever closer to that definition of pure form promoted by the great Polish artist anddecadent Sl Witkiewicz aka Witkacy. That is: art — in this case music — that cannot be reduced to anything other than itself andtherefore momentarily alerts or shocks the listener to the true strangeness and beauty of being.

AMM's singular shocking moment in Newfoundland is stretched to a taut 76 minute whole. Any one detail ispacked with absorbing incident: dig an instance featuring distant-sounding chimes, the loose, dank and otherworldly knots f piano notes and the great, ghastly bowel-rattling laughter of Rowe's guitar-sprung electronics. And then a lost radio voice is fed through Rowe's pickup, temporarily anchoring the night in space and time. Rowe's ether-trawling catapults youback to the excitement of the dawn of broadcasting. Way bacvk then, a listener was asked if h could hear the singing of Caruso. No, he replied, but "I could occsionally catch the ecstasy." Just picture that early, primitive listening pleasure, when radio hams strained topick up music over transatlantic wires, unsure whether they were tuning into heavenly static or the voiuce of angels, and you begin to get close to the pleasure of AMM.

Biba Kopf
The Wire (UK) July 1994