Duos for Doris features guitarist Keith Rowe and pianist John Tilbury, two-thirds of the current AMM lineup, but in place of AMM's layers of thick description (an approach nicely summed up by the title of their album Laminal), these duets offer a scrupulous thinness. Rowe describes this as a "music of zero" in his session notes (posted on Erstwhile's website): "A music that might be nothing in itself but juxtaposed to another: together transformed." This process takes place as much in the listener as in the music itself. Brian Olewnick, who was present at the recording session, contributed a notable early review of the disc for the online journal Bagatellen, one characterized by a vigorous, often violent imagery and diction that convey the impression of a disc characterized by furious activity. And yet my first impression on hearing it was closer to "OK, so where's the music?": one wouldn't easily divine from his review that the presiding dynamic level is on a finely- graded scale from p to pppp, with a few momentous exceptions. Yet his review is not therefore inaccurate: the lamination of the musical experience comes not so much in the performance itself as in relistening. For a visual analogy, think of a piece of mica, whose individual layers are each brittle, translucent and almost colorless: it is only as layer is added to layer that the mineral gains character and substance. What is at first almost not there is gradually materialized as it is successively folded back on itself. If Olewnick's review has something of the princess and the pea about it, this is only because in this music, the pea actually becomes more sensible with each additional layer of mediation.

Mediating layers have been piling on at an alarming rate: the disc comes with a mountain of backstory, and continues to touch off further narratives even after its release. It took Erstwhile's Jon Abbey two yearsof coaxing and organizing to arrange the recording session, originally scheduled as a two-day session in January 2003, at the auditorium in Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France, where AMM's Fine was recorded. These plans were disrupted by the death of Tilbury's mother Doris at the age of 95, three days before recording was to take place. Wishing to fulfill his commitment, Tilbury agreed to come for an abbreviated, one-day session. The disc is dedicated to his mother's memory; these personal circumstances are reflected in the fugitive and shadowed nature of the music. Another layer of circumstance was added by the fearful political moment, as Bush's America and Blair's England entered the last frenzied stage of threats and self-justification preparatory to the assault on Iraq. The disc has since become further entangled in issues of political dissent because of l'affaire Tilbury at The Wire. (An article by Olewnick discussing both Tilbury's music and his decision to cease performing in the USA, as a response to the vicious imperialism of the Bush regime, had much of its political content removed by The Wire's editors. Tilbury's subsequent angry letter to the editor touched off further discussion in the journal's pages and elsewhere.)

The album contains three tracks, arranged in descending order of length over two CDs: "Cathnor" (70 minutes), "Olaf" (45) and "Oxleay" (17). The dramatically decreasing lengths are symbolic of the music itself, which so often gives the impression that it is steadily receding. Spread across these discs are some of the most extended, nuanced and lingering decrescendos ever recorded, the last of them running from a point halfway through "Olaf" right to the end of "Oxleay." "Cathnor" recedes, rather than builds, to a climax: there's a false alarm early on - two or three sharply-struck notes from the piano around the 20-minute mark - but from this point the tide instead begins to withdraw, with incredible slowness. Rowe's menacing encroaching crackle thins out and then thins out again, into an ultrafine hiss, and Tilbury finds less and less occasion to intrude; by the 39-minute mark there's barely anything left at all, beyond Rowe's little shapeless tufts of string-noise - the sound of someone waiting, not impatiently but watchfully. Now, after three- quarters of an hour, the piece's violent catharsis arrives: its open expressiveness, however frightening, is also a relief compared to what precedes it. It comes with a resolving minor-key coda from the pianist; here Rowe's bowed guitar is so traditionally elegaic it's virtually a substitute for a cello part.

Though it too has several punctuating events and one sharply-jutting peak just before the halfway point, "Olaf"'s overall sound is shaped by Tilbury's use of preparation to turn the piano strings into tuned percussion (unlike most prepared-piano specialists, he mutes rather than augments strings: he seems comparatively uninterested in wilder sounds like buzzes and rattles). What is left when the music's tide recedes are long passages where morse-code messages are softly tapped out back and forth inside the piano. It is with infinite slowness - the process takes up the entire second half of the piece, in fact - that these coalesce into a final, anguished statement from the (now untreated) piano.

"Oxleay" is a continuation of the preceding track in mood and in dynamic, with Rowe marking the evolutionary stages by gradually stepping down the background hiss (at this stage he's barely touching his guitar). The pianist's hard-won expressiveness is diffused in homeopathic stages, diluted and then diluted again as it approaches a condition of stillness. At the end comes a small surprise: in the final seconds, when you expect a clean tapering-off or a cosmetic fade-out, the music actually gathers a little force toitself, enough so that the track's ending seems a trifle abrupt.

It's easy enough to end a review with a glib "Recommended," but this is hardly a disc amenable to such bubble-packaging, for all the elegance of its presentation. Traces of the tedious figure of the agonized Romantic artist give me pause in Rowe's liner notes - the heroics of the claim that "failure beckons"; Tilbury's citation of Clifford Curzon's "People do not know the cost of a phrase," with its mandarin adversion on "people" and its apparent implication that the (personal) cost of a phrase must necessarily be high. In this vein one could complain about an excess of momentousness in the music. I might have mounted that critique at one point; listening to the album again, I'm surer that this is a misjudgment. But I'm not certain: and, come to think of it, I'd better go put it on the stereo now for another listen....