"Some would argue that comfort is the last thing improvised music should give the listener; Eddie Prévost and John Tilbury would most probably concur. However,Uncovered Correspondence: a Postcard from Jasło is bafflingly comforting; not because it is bucolic, even though the ratio of cool calm passages to robust clangor is higher than usual on AMM’s recordings, but because the percussionist and the pianist have such a dependably refined and complementary rapport. This stands out more than usual because this concert recording is AMM’s first album since 2006’s that mysterious forest below London Bridge (Matchless) to feature Prévost and Tilbury as a duo. This rapport certainly didn’t evaporate on 08’s Trinity and 09’s Sounding Music (also on Matchless) that included adjuncts like John Butcher Christian Wolff and Ute Kanngiesser, but was instead absorbed in the larger ensembles. Isolated, Prévost and Tilbury’s emphasis on tone color and decay does not simply base-coat the music – it is the music in the main. Much the same was repeatedly said of AMM during Keith Rowe’s long tenure, but there seems to be something approaching a fundamental shift in AMM’s agenda since the noise-privileging guitarist’s departure – a new regard for beauty, though not in an ordinary sense of the word. Each of the three “Paragraphs” (the presumably Cardew-inspired designation of structure folds neatly into the correspondence theme) has exquisite moments where the chiming quality of Tilbury’s spare keyboarding dovetails with the more spectral timbres produced in the piano’s interior (he is always impressively nimble at producing roughly antiphonal exchanges with himself) or the metallic sheen of Prévost’s bowed cymbals. Not all of these passages simply hover in the stillness of the hushed concert hall; the album ends with a surprising and affecting outpouring before slipping into silence. While there is nothing dilutive or simplified about Uncovered Correspondence: a Postcard from Jasło, it is the most inviting album AMM has ever made." - Bill Shoemaker.  --- Recorded at the concert hall of the Jasielski Dom Kultury in southern Poland on 15th May 2010 by Karol Moszczyński. Edited, mixed and mastered by Sebastian Lexer. Front cover - Jaslo market, 1915. Reproduced here with kind permission of Jerzy Rucinsky. 

Digital copy of this much sought after Pogus LP issued in 1990, PLUS 'Treatise '84' - Rowe, Prévost & Tilbury's improvisation inspired and guided by Cornelius Cardew's graphic score. An entry in Cardew's Treatise reads, "Joining AMM was the turning point, both in the compositions of Treatise and in everything I have thought about music up to now. Before that Treatise had been an elaborate attempt at graphic notation of music (which I can only describe as a graphic score that produces in the reader, without any sound, something analogous to the experience of music), a network of nameless lines and spaces pursuing their own geometry untethered to themes and modulations, 12 note series and their transformations, the rules or laws of musical composition and all the other figments of the musicological imagination.   --- John Tilbury / piano Keith Rowe / guitar Eddie Prévost / drums --- Recorded at a concert given at the Arts Club, Chicago, USA on the 25th of May, 1984 by Denis O'Shea. The track 'Combine + Laminates' was first issued as an LP by Pogus Productions. Mastered by Thomas Dimuzio. Produced by Al Margolis and David Prescott. Artwork by Keith Rowe.  

"The richness of the music is quite extraordinary: it is sombre, elegiac, often exuberant, sometimes playful; there are occasional allusions to world musics as well as references to pointillism and Webern, there is delicacy and finesse, elegant phrasing, fragmentation, bell like sonorities of great beauty; there are flights of fancy and wild stretches of near anarchy." - John Tilbury'Camden' recorded during the Freedom of the City festival, Sharpe House, London on May 6th 2012'Deptford' recorded at a concert at Old Deptford Town Hall, Goldmiths' College, London on 25th May 2012'Dalston' recorded at a concert at Cafe Oto, London on 15th January, 2013 --- Recordings by Giovanni La Rovere (tracks 1, 2 & 3) and Rick Campion (track 1). All tracks mixed and mastered by Sebastian Lexer. Notes by John Tilbury.  Review in The Wire magazine, October 2013: "Hearing Evan Parker make music with Eddie Prévost, on the first of these three lengthy duets recorded in three different London boroughs, is like watching a pair of tai chi masters sparring. Parker’s tenor and Prévost’s bowed and struck percussion draw buoyancy from each other’s energy as they alternately push and yield. Together they move with feline lightness, agility and balance, even when the music’s mood is stormy and turbulent. The event was Freedom Of The City 2012; the venue, Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town, London. The character and dynamics of that occasion change continuously, but there’s never a sense that this exhilarating music is getting locked into a formal shape or falling under the shadow of its performers’ individual identities. Two other engrossing duets on TriBorough Triptych feature pianist Sebastian Lexer: with Prévost at Old Deptford Town Hall, South London, and with Parker on soprano at Dalston’s Cafe Oto. Lexer’s playing is disciplined and rather sparing, although he clearly enjoys pianistic practices and sonorities, not least perhaps for their historical weight, an element of resistance he can work with or against, just as Parker and Prévost parry the associations clinging to their own chosen instruments. But Lexer’s piano+ set-up involves a personally developed software to analyse and adjust the acoustic output, eliciting textures and durations unexpected from a grand piano, enhancing its scope and introducing an air of instability that calls for sharp reactions. Parker and Prévost are kept in states of heightened attentiveness, and the sustained outcome is lucid and graceful music making." - Julian Cowley  --- Tracklisting: 1. Camden (Parker/Prévost) 28:24 2. Deptford (Lexer/Prévost) 26:04 3. Dalston (Lexer/Parker) 24:55

A reissue of what is chronologically the 3rd full AMM album, following AMM:1966 and The Crypt. Recorded during the years of 1973-75, this marks an unusual and little recognized period in the group's history. For about 5 years, Keith Rowe (and his guitar and electronics) had left the group (along with Cornelius Cardew), leaving AMM as a working duo of Eddie Prévost (drums) and Lou Gare (tenor saxophone). That makes this the most jazz-like version of AMM, but as Martin Davidson noted in the original liner notes, this is not jazz; "absolutely nothing (melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo) was predetermined." This DL includes bonus material added to the 1994 CD release.  ---Lou Gare / tenor saxophone Eddie Prévost / drums --- Tracklisting: 1. Unity First - 7:40 2. To Hear - 21:39 3. Back Again - 13:48 4. Kunstmusik - 13:48 5. Duett - 9:18 --- Unity First was recorded at the Unity Theatre, London, on 1st April 1975 by Martin Davidson. To Hear and Back Again (originally released on vinyl) were recorded at West Square Electronic Music Studio, London on 30th November 1974 by Barry Anderson and John Dodd. Kunstmusik and Duett were recorded at the Academie der Kunste, Berlin in June 1973. Recording engineer unknown. 

"The music you hear on this DL has a distinct urgency and excitement. It moves forward in a complicated, constantly mutating web of stylistic references to musical precedents within jazz and twetieth century music, overlapped in a restless search for new textures, moods, dynamic interludes, and possible resolutions. Some listeners may feel - as others have done in the past - that sections of the Quartet's music sounds like be-bop heard at a distance or in a dream. There is certainly something in this perception. But the likeness never goes beyond mood or the resemblance of incidental allusion. Perhaps there are changes of the instrument temporarily foregrounded in the ensemble that are reminiscent of devices for handling over solos in jazz, including be-bop.But you need only listen to the rhythmic and harmonic mutations and uncertainties, or to the continuously re-defined relationships the four instruments enter into with one another, to be made aware that the music never becomes stylistic imitation or pastiche" - Alan Durant. --- Larry Stabbins / tenor and soprano saxophones Veryan Weston / piano Marcio Mattos / double bass Eddie Prévost / drums --- DL re-release of material previously issued as an LP, together with additional music. Part 1 was recorded at the Bracknell Jazz Festival on the 3rd of July, 1983. Part 2 was recorded at Porcupine Studios London by Ted Taylor. Front cover artwork by Simon Picard

First released as two LPs in 1979 - two recordings of a concert at the Cambridge College of Art and Technoloy on May 19, 1977. "More thank any other music I know of, improvisation puts the musician at the heart of the matter. Face on and with no time for premeditated artifice: technique, dialogue and heurism are put to a fiery test in performance. And, for a musician to comment upon the aesthetic implications of this work also seems to be a dangerous activity. But I for one (even if from time to time I am roved wrong) enjoy the skirmish." - Eddie Prévost, March 1993.  --- Geoff Hawkins / tenor saxophone Gerry Gold / trumpet and flugelhorn Marcio Mattos / double bass Eddie Prévost / drums --- Recorded at a concert organised by Jane and Roger Giddings given at The Mumford Theatre, Cambridge College of Art and Technology on May the 19th, 1977. Mastered By George Peckham. Recorded By Pete Nesbit. Concert Organized By Jane and Roger Giddings All tracks are as the two original LPs except the short piece "Time Immoral", which had to be omitted to fit the CD format. Front cover artwork by Allen Fisher. 

"After a life-long study of percussion, Eddie Prévost has discovered ways of making the instruments reveal hidden aspects of thei voices. These, his first solo recordings, comprise and anthology of this long study but at the same time there is a freshness here that suggests the research is far from over." - Evan Parker ---Eddie Prévost / percussion --- Tracklisting: 1. Squeal, Sough and Stidulate - 12:40 2. Octavian Law - 4:31 3. Rumble, Buzz, Pound and Crash - 7:22 4. Azurine - 9:03 5. Bermondsey Breakdown - 10:07 6. Loci of Change - 19:54 --- Recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston, England on September 10th 1996 by Steve Lowe. Produced by Evan Parker. Artwork by Keith Rowe using photographs of Paige Mitchell and Keith Rowe. 

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. --- John Tilbury / piano Keith Rowe / guitar Eddie Prévost / drums --- Recorded at the School of Music, NUM, St. John's, Newfoundland on 2nd July 1992 as part of Sound Symposium Six. Thanks to all the Sound Symposium team, especially to Don Wherry and Kathy Clark. Artwork by Keith Rowe and Howard Skempton. 

"This trio, quite intuitively (because I never spelt out what I hoped would happen) works in a subtle, attentive way: examining what the music is and where it is going all within the process of playing; feeling the sound to be complementary and in contrast to other sounds; feeling the stuff of the instruments, and sensing the presence of other creative beings. This is part of the extraordinary and gloriously uncertain matrix of what making and listening to music should be about" - Eddie Prévost  ---Tom Chant / soprano saxophone John Edwards / double bass Eddie Prévost / drums --- Recorded at Gateway Studios, Kingston, on 9th March 1997 by Steve Lowe. Front Cover 'Childsplay' by Stella Cardew. 

"Eddie Prevost, Keith Rowe, Evan Parker and Barry Guy split their differences for a music that touches upon both the classic AMM aesthetic and the more (extended) technical language that Parker and Guy often frequent for something that truly supercedes both approaches for something other. Moments of alien stillness laden with the tension that they may soon be interrupted."- Greg Kelly. --- Evan Parker - soprano & tenor saxophones Keith Rowe - guitar, electronics Barry Guy - double bass, electronics Eddie Prévost - percussion --- Recorded at a concert given in London on 3rd September 1984. Artwork designed by Keith Rowe & Myuh Chun. 

Jennifer Allum alternates two bows, a 17th century German one and a 'conveyor-belt' bow. Eddie Prévost picks a mass-produced model and two more given to him by Lou Gare and Lawrence Sheaff. Improvised, but sounds remarkably composed & precise. --- Jennifer Allum - violin Eddie Prévost - bowed percussion --- Tracklisting: 1. Investigative Study I - 8:39 2. Investigative Study II - 9:18 3. Investigative Study III - 10:49 4. Dolwilym Penumbra - 37:09 --- Investigative Studies were recorded at The Welsh Chapel, London on 13th July 2010 by Sebastian Lexer. Dolwilym Penumbra was recorded at the Mwnci Studios on the Dolwilym Eastate, west Wales on 12th October 2010 by Jethro Chaplin.

Recorded in concert at The Network Theatre, Waterloo in London, 2012, the trio of Tom Chant on saxophone, John Edwards on bass and Eddie Prevost on drums present a tour de force of modern free jazz with great technical and conversational power. --- Tom Chant / tenor & soprano saxophones John Edwards / double bass Eddie Prévost / drums ---  Tracklisting: 1. All Change - Part 1 (43:23) 2. All Change - Part 2 (30:11) --- Recorded on 13th June 2012 by Giovanni La Rovere. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux. Design by Myuh Chun.

Beautiful improvised duets from Jennifer Allum and Ute Kanngiesser. Each recording was made in a different part of St Augustine's Bell Tower, Hackney - the ticking of the church clock mechanism carrying on delightfully in the backround, joined occasionally by the occasional bell chime or car alarm.  --- Jennifer Allum / violin Ute Kanngiesser / cello --- Recorded on 29th May 2012 at St Augustine's Bell Tower, Hackney, London by Enanuele Costantini. Mixed and edited by Sebastian Lexer. Design by Myah Chun. With thanks to David Ryan for facilitating the recordings, and to Hackney Historic Buildings Trust for giving access to the tower.  --- Review -  "The music on the first track has a nice and sometimes even powerful interaction of high almost whistling tones interwining like a slow rhythmless dance, a cautious circling around a tonal center, with vibrating notes floating in mid-air, then gradually losing even the faint substance they had to become even more ethereal and ephemeral, slight wisps of music supported by silence. The second track, "Clock Room", has more gravitas, with a more forceful attack of the bows, even if that is still fragile. The pièce-de-résistance is the half hour long "Bell Room", in which the outside world quietly invades the music, and is integrated, carefully lifted into a new level of fragility and refinement. Each note has value here, and when silence takes the foreground, with the distant ambulance the only sound to be heard, deep tones from the cello and super-high tones from the violin create a mirrored drone-like repetition, full of menace and anxiety. Many people will wonder about this music, and probably that's good. It has its own voice, its own story, its own aesthetic. It may take some time to get into it, but as usual the effort is worth taking." - London Jazz News. 

IRMA is a 1969 experimental opera by artist Tom Phillips.  The score involved 93 random phrases taken from the 1892 novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. They were then divided up into sound suggestions, a libretto and staging directions. In 1988 Phillips invited AMM to perform the piece with guests in London's Union Chapel.  "If any work marks the end of the 60's, it is Irma, composed as it was in the twilight months of that decade, and presaging as it did the world of deconstruction to come. The sixties were the years of revolution: there was often as many as thirty three per minute, some of which featured music. Although it is in the tradition of the Romantic Grand Opera, Irma, with its distancing wit, somehow brings them altogether in a potted Dämmerung. Whereas Wagner had failed in is quest for the true Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the arts of music poetry and visual spectacle are brought into balance in a single work, Phillips succeeds triumphantly. In a recording of course we forfeit the visual element, but close attention to the text will enable the listener to imagine the sumptuous scenic effects and opulant mise en scène. To quote A HUTMENT, ‘The Sound in my life enlarges my prison…’ - H.W.K. Collam --- Eddie Prévost / percussionKeith Rowe / guitarJohn Tilbury / piano, radioIan Mitchell / clarinetLol Coxhill / saxophone, vocalsElise Lorraine / vocalsPhil Minton / vocalsTom Phillips / vocals --- Recorded at the Union Chapel, London, 20th May 1988 by Ray Beckett and Phil Mouldycliff (live mix). Artwork by Tom Phillips. Design by Keith Rowe. 

The recording of a concert given at the Muhlenberg College Arts Center Recital Hall Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA on Sunday 24th April 1994. The concert produced by improvisationalmusico, inc (a/k/a "improco") with assistance from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. -- Edwin (Eddie) Prévost / percussion John Tilbury / piano Keith Rowe / electric guitar --- Recorded at a concert given at Muhlenberg College Arts Center Recital Hall, Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA on Sunday 24th April 1994. Artwork by Keith Rowe - 'Allentown viewed from the AMM yellow truck (Elektra 1996) with reference to Georgia O'Keeffe, New York with Moon (1925)'.

Triple layered release to mark 30 years of AMM. Bumper .zip includes material from three distinct periods spanning a quarter of a century -Prévost, Rowe, Gare, Cardew and Hobbs in Denmark in 1969, the first recordings from the Prévost-Rowe-Tilbury trio in The Great Hall at Goldsmith's College, London, in 1982, and the same trio in New York in 1994.  "The description of AMM's music as laminal came from Evan Parker in a lecture he gave on improvisation during an Actual Music Festival at the ICA in London during August 1980. This he contrasted with the 'atmistic' apprach of other practicioners. The idea of layers superimposed on other layers has always seemed close to the actuality of AMM music." - Eddie Prévost.  Dedicated to Evan Parker. --- Tracklisting: The Aarhus Sequences 1-1 - 51:071-2 - 14:231-3 - 6:40 The Great Hall 2-1 - 36:452-2 - 38:56 Contextual 3-1 - 14:103-2 - 11:043-3 - 10:313-4 - 11:123-5 - 13:413-6 - 10:37

..."as I listened more deeply to the recording, I became more and more conscious of the pauses and the offstage noises, and also of the lack of audience response. Many of the cues that improvising musicians respond to were not there. I began to recall the psychology of the event. The vast cavern of the then unmodified Roundhouse - a huge Victorian brick domes building that had previously been a railway turning shed - was (at least for our concert) all but devoid of an audience. In the silences and pregnant pauses that were a characteristic of our performances you can hear doors swinging open and closes, a child's voice echoes in the distance, and there are other indistinguishable human murmuring and nameless isolating clonks. At the end of our performance - nothing. No applause, no cat calls. Merely the sound of empty indifference." - Eddie Prevost.  "Music from half a lifetime ago - that was a very good creative time musically and maybe a new generation will appreciate what we are doing then and are still doing now. Playing with Eddie in that format, just the two of us, was my most rewarding experience after the breakup of the AMM quartet. I could not go back after the freedom of the duo." - Lou Gare.   "Music with unusual qualities… very searching and balanced… no free jazz excursions… just the AMM connection, but with only two acoustic instruments. All about colour and minimal energy. Beautiful! And a very early example of what is later during the 2000´s happening in the world of improvised music and minimal improv…" - Discaholic Corner.  --- Lou Gare / tenor saxophone Eddie Prévost / drums --- Recorded at the International Carnival of Experimental Sound, or ICES 72, held at the Roundhouse. Also released on CD by Anomalour Records in 2003. 

"Rooms talk to me. I send out a sound, the space answers. The first message I picked up from the old barn in Umbria was "yes." Christian Wolff and I had been thinking, speaking about, even planning a CD with his solo percussion pieces since the premiere of the Dances in 1998. From that time I've been looking, waiting, hoping for the room that would say "yes." Here we are.  Christian Wolff does not compose percussion music. His percussion pieces are about as far away from the usual percussion techniques as I have travelled. If pressed to describe his music, I start by stating that I have never heard anything like it. It is virtuosic - though not about virtuosity. It's appearance - often - deceptively simple - always concisely constructed. Christian Wolff invites us on a magical journey through his world. A world where music we never imagined before exists. This is one of the spaces John Cage was talking about when he asked us to "let sounds be sounds". So they are. And there is so much music to be discovered there." - Robin Schulkowsky.  "Writing for percussion I've found is, more than for any other instrument, an experimental business. The music as I write it is, far more than usual, material out of which the player makes a music that is as much her own as the composer's, a kind of trusting conversation whose exchange and flow is what I like and whose sound may in this way be just itself as well." - Christian Wolff. --- Christian Wolff / composition, melodicaRobin Schulkowsky / percussion  --- Recorded at Poggiolo fram, Pozzuolo, Umbria, Italy on April 22-24 2003 by Adrian von Ripka. Cover by Tristram Wolff