Following two remarkable recent trio concerts with saxophonists Evan Parker and John Butcher, AMM co-founder Eddie Prévost returns on percussion with Sebastian Lexer piano+ and Seymour Wright alto saxophone. This will be the long-standing trios first performance at OTO, where they will play in the round.

Their trio CD Impossibility in its Purest Form was released this spring. Given four stars in Downbeat, described by Point of Departure as ‘dauntingly abstract’ yet ‘visceral’, its

harshness may articulate either the struggle of a music that is made out of nothingness and which will return to it, or the impossibility of the moment and the insistence on its potential for habitation.

And, the Liminal suggest that the trio

sound like they are working within the confines of the listener’s own cranium. Like craftsmen, they gently prepare and scrape at those bony surfaces, filling gaps, adding minimal embellishment. The more open-minded will find the restrictiveness paradoxically liberating, the trio ultimately carving out a door to a whole world of colour, shade and texture.

The lengthy association of the three began at the weekly London improvisation workshop initially convened by Prévost in 1999 and which they all still attend. From 2010 onward the three started a series of frequent collaborative studies: private sessions at a studio at Goldsmiths' College, London. This extended period of intensive work led them towards an approach to the improvisational process, well beyond the intuitive and the spontaneous. What has emerged is an activity defined and determined by what one commentator has referred to as ‘a super-concentrated series of potentialities’. It is where process – considered responses and decisions – include, but also supersede, the intuitive response.

Lexer has moved the piano/computer interface to a new plain, developing an augmented instrument able to integrate electro-acoustic process and contingency into the acoustic potential of the piano and ensemble – a human, tactile creative technology. Wright's practice and perception is variously acknowledged as both vigorous and considered, his approach to the history and potential of the saxophone – extended, truncated, as amplifier and vacuum – is unique. And, despite his long experience and advancing years Prévost’s enquiry about the nature of music and its meaning for human beings continues, as does his investigation into the possibilities held in three most ancient instruments of music – drum, cymbal and bow.

matchlessrecordings.com
sebastianlexer.eu
seymourwright.com

---