AMM Uncovered Correspondence: A Postcard from Jaslo
Reproduced on the front of Uncovered Correspondence is an old postcard showing the market square of Jaslo in southern Poland. In May 2010 the town's Cultural Centre hosted the AMM music relayed on this recording. Percussionist Eddie Prévost and pianist John Tilbury play for a little over an hour with great subtlety and concentration. Prévost bows metal, sets gongs and cymbals shimmering, makes stretched skins roar and moan. At one point, the sleevenotes reveal, he is actually sounding one of the venue's wood-panelled walls with a beater. Tilbury meticulously casts notes like pebbles, nuanced through weight and texture, gleaming with sustain. The outcome has mineral clarity and is exceptionally beautiful.
This AMM duo mark time with sound and create an arena of quiet intensity: a space — like a Japanese temple garden — devoted to attentiveness. AMM music invariably transforms experience of duration into a strong sense of location. As Evan Parker observed in notes for Prévost's 1996 release Loci of Change, the music provides "new space where we can sit quietly and be absorbed in listening". Uncovered Correspondence, divided into three 'paragraphs', has the feel of a self-contained and lucidly reflective statement. But as Parker noted of Prévost's solo work, it's "a social music that only completes a circuit when it is listened to as hard by the listener as it was by the player". Committed listeners will find that Prévost's and Tilbury's postcard from Jaslo says a great deal more than 'wish you were here."
Julian Cowley
Wire January 2011