AMMMusic

AMMMusic Artist: AMM
Label: Recommended Records
Category: Music


Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Format: Live
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1


UPC: 752725000925
EAN: 0752725000925
ASIN: B00000I0WR


Release Date: 1995-03-29

AMMMusic


Related Categories:

General General
Categories | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music
Experimental Rock Experimental Rock
Categories | Rock | Alternative Styles | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music
Avant Garde & Free Jazz Avant Garde & Free Jazz
Categories | Jazz | Styles | Music
General General
Categories | Jazz | Styles | Music
General General
Categories | Rock | Styles | Music
Pop Rock Pop Rock
Categories | Pop | Styles | Music

Tracks:

  1. Later During A Flaming Riviera Sunset
  2. Later During A Flaming Riviera Sunset (LP Version)
  3. Ailantus Glandulosa
  4. In The Realm Of Nothing Whatever
  5. After Rapidly Circling The Plaza
  6. After Rapidly Circling The Plaza (LP Version)
  7. What Is There In Uselesness to Cause You Distress?
  8. Silence

Similar Items:

  1. Machine Gun
  2. Die Donnergotter (The Thundergods)
  3. Toward the Margins
  4. Psychedelic Underground
  5. Os Mutantes

Product Description

Repressed. Monumental debut recording (originally issued by the Elektra recording company in far different times). "The classic first recording from 1966, with Cornelius Cardew, Eddie Prevost, Lou Gare, Keith Rowe and Lawrence Sheaf. One of the first attempts to bring Noise improvisation (radios, scraped guitars, prepared pianos) into popular culture. Essential and historic." See the Matchless label for the rest of AMM's discography.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars free-improvisation/noise masterpiece........2004-06-13

This is one of the best & most interesting albums I have ever heard. John Stevens was one of the central figures in the conception of European free improvisation, but it seems that the 'genre' was born in two specific albums. You have Peter Broztmann's _Machine Gun_, a brutal masterpiece from 1968, and this album by AMM, from 1966. Here, AMM takes improvisation into very abstract realms, consisting of long, shifting drones with unusual sounds in the fore. Sometimes there are traces of classical and jazz heard in individual components, but when this album was released there it would have been difficult to count on any conventional idioms with which AMM's music could be analyzed.

Often you'll be hard pressed to identify exactly what sounds are what -- the texture is very thick and soupy and the instruments (piano, saxophone, violin, cello, accordion, clarinet, electric guitar, percussion, and transistor radio) produce indefinable avant-garde drones. Different instruments seem to move in and out of focus, like the piano shaping tension as it emerges, plinks insistently, crosses scraping, angular string lines or encounters the squonking protest of saxophone. Sometimes they turn on the radio, giving it a more human sound, kind of like a random connection to the real world. It functions as an effective ingredient of this beautiful chaos.

The music is 'noisy' but very pacifying and meditative and evokes powerful emotions. Hearing these musicians craft their sounds with such intuition and interactivity is a revelatory experience in listening. Yet it remains a very intense tour de force of sound, primal yet refined and advanced. I don't think you will ever hear other music much like this, and it is a hugely important album that demands attention and greatly rewards it. Everyone should listen to this before they start to suffer from deficient hearing.

ReR's reissue is great also because of the liner notes by Eddie Prevost. He elucidates the meaning of the 13 aphorisms that expressed the group's artistic credo with a lot of interesting platonic discourse and history.

Listen to it!

5 out of 5 stars "a means of heightened awareness".......2003-07-08

This is an expanded version of the original AMM record, which was just called "AMMMUSIC," and it is astounding. There are five members playing, but it is hard to tell as this is process music, free improvisation -- drones and slow transitions, punctuated periodically by foregrounded piano, saxophone, percussion and taped music and spoken word off the radio. The two members still with AMM all these years later are Eddie Prevost, percussion, and Keith Rowe, electric guitar and transistor radio. Here they are joined by Cornelius Cardew on piano, cello and transistor radio, Lou Gare on tenor sax and violin, and Lawrence Sheaff on cello, accordion, clarinet and transistor radio.

Incredibly, the original album was released by Elektra, in an attempt to reach the new "psychedelic youth market." (Island released "Karyobin" by the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the U.K. at about the same time.) AMMMUSIC is a trip, that's for sure, but not the sort with standard vocals, guitar solos or power chords. It is radical, abstract stuff, located somewhere between free improvisation and the avant-garde composition of Stockhausen and Cage. While not as intense as the next recording, "The Crypt," it is much louder and more electronic than the more recent AMM. Michael Nyman wrote an excellent book which covers the early AMM called "Experimental Music" (see my review).

I've looked for this record with no luck until now, and so although it was released on CD in 1990, it seems to have been either re-pressed or just re-stocked. The cover is one of Keith Rowe's great pop art pieces. (I don't know if it was Elektra's cover.) It is 74 minutes long if you program the full-length versions of all five pieces. The original, shortened versions are included as well, so you can program the 1967 LP version instead. And a 10-second silent track is included as well, "allowing you to programme silence wherever you wish." The 20-page booklet includes a long essay by Prevost written in 1988, and includes the 13 aphorisms that constituted the orinal sleeve text. Examples: "III: The reason for playing is to find out what I want to play," and "V: Every noise has a note." The quote I have used as my title is taken from Prevost's essay, characterizing AMM music. The essay is quite revealing and informative, but as Prevost acknowledges, can go only so far in explaining with words something that goes beyond the rational.

This is a key document in the development of free improvisation. Over the years AMM would turn to a much quieter expression of process music, with pianist John Tilbury joining Prevost and Rowe to form the line-up that has been stable since the 1980s, but the basics haven't changed since this original breakthrough.

5 out of 5 stars

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