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