a r t i s t : AMM
t i t l e : At The Roundhouse
d a t e : 2003
l a b e l : Anomalous ICES 01
g e n r e : Avantgarde
r l s. d a t e : Apr/2006
t r a c k s : 01
b i t r a t e : VBRkbps
s i z e : 70,3 MB
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AMM
Eddie Prevost: drums
Lou Gare: tenor saxophone
Recorded live at the the International Carnival of
Experimental Sound (ICES), The Roundhouse, London, August 1972
Original recording engineer (1972): John Lifton
Audio (2002): Scott Colburn
Inside booklet photos courtesy of Jak Kilby
Released in 2003
Extracts of the recording were originally released as a 7-inch
record on Incus (AMM at the Roundhouse, EP1)
"This is the first installment of what will hopefully be a
series of releases documenting Harvey Matusow's "International
Carnival of Experimental Sound" festival at London's
Roundhouse in 1972 (the story of which is told by Eric
Lanzillotta in his liner notes), and a major release it is
too. Two brief extracts from this concert, which took place on
August 22nd that year, were released as a 7" single on Incus,
but this is the first time the performance has been available
in its entirety (in quad sound too, if you have ProLogic
decoding technology, whatever that is). Mention AMM to most
folk today and the names of Keith Rowe and John Tilbury will
probably spring to mind, but it's worth recalling that in the
mid 1970s, following some internal changes in socio-political
ideals, the group consisted of only two musicians:
percussionist Eddie Prevost and tenor saxophonist Lou Gare.
When Rowe rejoined AMM in 1976, Gare himself bowed out - "I
could not go back after the freedom of the duo", he writes in
a brief postscript to Prevost's notes to this disc. Gare
continued to perform in and around Exeter, where he moved in
1976, and even rejoined AMM briefly later, but in recent years
has tended to concentrate on other interests, notably teaching
Aikido and making and repairing stringed instruments (if
you're in Devon and your fiddle needs a twiddle, go to
http://www.lgare.fsnet.co.uk).
Prevost is right to describe the duo's work as "decidedly
non-jazz"; true, apart from the instrumentation itself
(Interstellar Space inevitably comes to mind), one can find
certain points of comparison - Prevost plays his snare drum
like Sunny Murray uses his cymbals (think of "Real" on the BYG
Actuel album Sunshine) to set up complex fields of vibration,
extending the concept of rhythm far beyond the traditional
confines of time-keeping û but as writer Wayne Spencer has
pointed out, Gare and Prevost are at their most radical when
not playing. Or, rather, when the level of volume and
event-density drops to something more akin to today's
lowercase improv. "In the silences and pregnant pauses that
were a characteristic of our performances you can hear doors
swinging open and closed, a child's voice echoes in the
distance, and there are other indistinguishable human
murmurings and nameless isolated clonks", writes Prevost. "At
the end of our performance - nothing. No applause, no
cat-calls. Merely the empty sound of indifference."
Small audiences for improvised music are nothing new, though
it's hard to imagine music of this quality being greeted with
stony silence today - not that one could expect a tenor
saxophone / percussion duet to sound anything like this
anymore. This particular incarnation of AMM (also documented
on the Matchless album To Hear and Back Again) was neither
ahead of nor behind its time, but quite simply not of its
time. The high-speed clatter of Pauls Lovens and Lytton (not
to mention Roger Turner and numerous others), which has become
the accepted (I'm tempted to say "traditional") way of playing
percussion in a free improvised context, is notably absent
from Prevost's vocabulary. Similarly, Gare's tenor playing
bears absolutely no relation either to his immediate
predecessors in free jazz (Coltrane, Ayler et al.) or to the
then-emergent extended techniques of Parker and Br÷tzmann. Nor
is it a precursor of today's saxophone language: multiphonics,
key clicks, breathy flutters and splutters are conspicuously
absent, as are cathartic blasts of screaming noise. If Prevost
had frisbeed his cymbals at the ceiling or destroyed a potted
plant or two a la Han Bennink, or if Gare had blown his
saxophone through his nose (to quote Zorn) and burst a few
blood vessels a la Brotzmann, perhaps the handful of people
present in the cavernous space of the Roundhouse would have
reacted. But that's not what AMM music has ever been about.
Prevost and Gare make no concessions to popular fads and
fancies. "It is perhaps difficult for people now to appreciate
how important the music was to us", Prevost writes. I
seriously doubt that anyone listening attentively to these 47
minutes of extraordinary music could fail to appreciate the
importance of this magnificent document." (~Dan Warburton)
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01-The Sound Of Indifference [46:52]
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46:52 min