| 1 | Newfoundland | 1:16:47 |
76 minute piece recorded live in 1992, featuring the Rowe/Prévost/Tilbury trio - tremendous atmospherics and one of their ultimate recordings.
"It is surely too easy to resort to adjectives such as 'rumbling', 'juddering', 'thudding', 'rippling' and 'growling'. This music is so stunningly immediate, so palpable that it makes a nonsense of such musings." - Howard Skempton.
"AMM's singular shocking moment in Newfoundland is stretched to a taut 76 minute whole. Any one detail is packed with absorbing incident: dig an instance featuring distant-sounding chimes, the loose, dank and otherworldly knots of piano notes and the great, ghastly bowel-rattling laughter of Rowe's guitar-sprung electronics. And then a lost radio voice is fed through Rowe's pickup, temporarily anchoring the night in space and time. Rowe's ether-trawling catapults you back to the excitement of the dawn of broadcasting. Way back then, a listener was asked if h could hear the singing of Caruso. No, he replied, but 'I could occasionally catch the ecstasy.' Just picture that early, primitive listening pleasure, when radio hams strained to pick up music over transatlantic wires, unsure whether they were tuning into heavenly static or the voice of angels, and you begin to get close to the pleasure of AMM." -- Biba Kopf, The Wire.
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John Tilbury / piano
Keith Rowe / guitar
Eddie Prévost / drums
Available as a 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC download.
Tracklisting:
1. Newfoundland - 76:45
Eddie Prévost began his life in music as a jazz drummer. A recurring interest in this form has been maintained, although always with an experimental ethos. Along the way he has maintained his fifty-year plus experimental credentials with AMM and numerous other improvisation projects, including his now twenty-year long weekly workshop. But drumming has generally been backgrounded to his experimental percussion work. More though, is to be expected of his drumming in 2020 on forthcoming multi-CD album: The Unexpected Alchemy. A part of this Krakow festival recording features the drums and saxophone trio of Ken Vandermark, Hamid Drake, and Eddie Prévost. His most recent released recordings include AMM’s: An Unintended Legacy, and a duo with John Butcher - Visionary Fantasies, both on Matchless Recordings. Also, a solo percussion LP on the Earshots label called Matching Mix. Later, in 2020 he meets with Jason Yarde and Nathan Moore, while in March concerts and recording will hear him drumming with US guitarist Henry Kaiser and saxophonist Binker Golding.
“Prévost's free drumming flows superbly making use of his formidable technique. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or Max Roach.” - Melody Maker
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
Keith Rowe (born 16 March 1940 in Plymouth, England) is an English free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both the influential AMM in the mid-1960s (though in 2004 he quit that group for the second time) and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, Rowe's paintings have been featured on most of his own albums. After years of obscurity, Rowe has achieved a level of relative notoriety, and since the late 1990s has kept up a busy recording and touring schedule. He is seen as a godfather of EAI (electroacoustic improvisation), with many of his recent recordings having been released by Erstwhile Records.
John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.
Video by Helen Petts
