| 76 minute piece recorded live in 1992, featuring the Keith Rowe/ Eddie Prévost/John Tilbury trio; tremendous atmospherics and one of their ultimate recordings.
AMM statements have made much of the possibility (even necessary presence) of failure in every performance, both as an index of the demands of improvisation and as a source of new material and directions. The recordings of the trio since 1982, however, would seem to dispute the issue: Prévost, Rowe and Tilbury have been producing spontaneous masterpieces of unique scale and design. It's precisely at this stage that descriptions of AMM recordings become so difficult. Most of their recordings are performances. Several CDs - Newfoundland, Live in Allentown, From a Strange Place - consist of a single track from an hour to 75 minutes in length. Even CDs that are segmented represent edits or mere divisions in long performances. These performances are both spontaneous and unstructured. While they can suggest geological stratification, layers and depths and qualities of material with instrumental voices shifting around like continental blocks, the points of interest, and how they might be heard or described, are largely subjective, the listener somehow at the center of the work. |
