AMM (Eddie Prevost on percussion and John Tilbury on piano(+)) performing a 1 hour, 1 minute and 1 second live concert at the 2012 Festival of Traditional and Avant-Garde Music in Lublin, Poland in a beautiful melding of unconventional approaches to improvisation.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2014 Country: Great Britain Packaging: Cardstock Gatefold Sleeve Recorded at CODES, The Festival of Traditional and Avant-garde Music, in Lublin, Poland on May 16th, 2012, by Jaroslaw Rudnicki.
"First assembling in 1965, AMM is likely the longest running group in improvised music, though that near half-century is marked by dramatic changes, both in musical content and membership. Its constants through that time have been the percussionist Eddie Prévost and a commitment to improvised music built on close listening. Since 1980 the group's most frequent form has been the duo of Prévost and pianist John Tilbury.
Place sub v. presents an hour-long performance from the 2012 Festival of Traditional and Avant-Garde Music in Lublin, Poland. It's a work both minimalist and monumental in which Prévost bows and brushes metallic percussion and Tilbury introduces isolated and microscopic figures at the keyboard of a piano that is sometimes prepared. Elsewhere he seems to strike the wood of the piano to create bass rumbles that suggest distant thunder. There are also bass sounds that suggest bowed glissandi in the lowest register of a string bass, but aren't. There are passing resemblances to the percussion music of John Cage and the piano music of Morton Feldman, but these do not significantly shape the music.
Here close listening, the specific resonances of the space, the contour of a sound and its developing relations to time and silence are everything. One may hear silence being subtly massaged or sound and time coaxed into being, but the absolute purity and indivisibility of this music is such that any description risks falsifying the experience of it."-Stuart Broomer, Musicworks
"A recording of a live concert from Lublin in Poland, the heart of old Europe, which precisely one hour, one minute and one second. The title uses the abbreviations of a dictionary entry. Since AMM became a duo a decade ago, Tilbury and Prévost have released several albums under the name, of which Place is the latest. After the high energy of other discs in this column, it's good to find a more pensive mood pervading the recording, and such delicacy and sensitivity of sound production. Pensive doesn't equate with Zen-calm - this music is quieter and sparser, at times with a beautiful gamelin-like effect, but at others with an air of foreboding or uncertainty. This isn't reductionism, which in philosophy means a simplified strategy - an inappropriate description for playing of such intensity and fragility. It's powerful, humane and uncomfortable music."-The Wire