Two concerts of experimental improvisation from Eddie Prevost and Christian Wolff, two giants of conceptual improvisation and composition, recorded at Ikletick in London in 2015 and at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire in 2016; with superb pacing and brilliant execution, these dialogs between keyboard and percussive instruments explore unique sound worlds with depth, inquisitiveness, and a sense of wonder. "The set documents two concerts - 1, recorded at Iklectik in London in September 2015, is in two parts, 37 and 18 minutes in length; 2, recorded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, in July 2016 is a singular 50-minute piece. Each musician restricts himself to a relative narrow palate. Prévost uses a bass drum as both drum and resonator and explores bowing and scraping cymbals for sustained metallic sounds, with very rare eruptions of multiple sounds. Wolff plays piano with even greater delicacy, from isolated sustained tones, alternated intervals, subtle use of plucked strings and minimal preparation and an occasional brief melodic figure. A keyboard wind instrument, perhaps a melodica, arises brieflyin both concerts." - Free Jazz Collective --- Eddie Prévost / percussion Christian Wollf /piano --- Artwork by Myah Chun Grierson. Edited and mastered by Giovani La Rovere and Rupert Clervaux. Recorded by Giovani La Rovere and Sangwook Nam.

"How do we push beyond the merely presentational? Market acceptability is surely a too limiting artistic objective. Maybe, no objective at all. Contrary to what so many commentators and educators promulgate, there is always somewhere else to go, to explore, to enlarge and to enhance. Being content with one's lot is aesthetic (and maybe political death). There are no fixed objectives as characterised and circumscribed by systems and conventions. Within these digitally configured sounds you will hear cross generational responses to these questions. Nathanial Catchpole (b. 1980), John Edwards (b.1964) and myself (b. 1942) Negotiating the challenges of uncertainty. What might seem to be (on repeated listening) a fixed pattern, was, in performance, a series of questions and choices. How much should we push, pull, nudge and test anticipated responses? And, how much should we try the patience of our fellow musicians and our audience? These considerations are not necessarily barriers to playful activity. They are always - joyfully - limits to surmount and other horizons to be viewed." - Eddie Prévost. --- John Edwards / double bass Nathaniel Catchpole / tenor saxophone Edwin (Eddie) Prévost / drums and bowed tam-tam --- Recorded at a concert given at Network Theatre, London 21st December, 2014 by Giovanni La Rovere. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux. Design by Myah Chun.

2012 recording of AMM duo Prévost & Tilbury at Slovenia's Španski Borci. Surely both artists felt a certain respect playing in a place with references to the Spanish Civil War and no doubt it influences their playing here. Sparse and heavy.  "John Tilbury’s piano playing is quiet yet emphatic, the notes suspended and widely spaced. Eddie Prévost’s cymbals and bass drum skin moan and shimmer, apt but never obvious. Like an atom, it is mostly empty, but filled with potential power. Prévost and Tilbury’s freely improvised dialogue carries on an episodic discussion that has gone on since the days of Swinging London, sometimes restive, sometimes terribly fractured, and now spare and unerringly right. They police themselves, never imposing like the fascists that the Spanish fighters resisted." – Bill Meyer, January 2016 --- John Tilbury / piano Eddie Prévost / percussion --- Recorded by Izack Zupan at the festival Neposlusno (Sound Disobedience) in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2012. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux. Artwork by Myah Chen.

Complete audio recordings of Evan Parker, John Edwards and Eddie Prévost's May 2013 residency at Cafe OTO.  --- Evan Parker / tenor saxophone John Edwards / double bass Edwin (Eddie) Prévost / drums Alexander von Schlippenbach / piano Christof Thewes / trombone --- "Given the different line-ups and the inclusion of both sets from each of three nights, the listener is presented with the chance to hear the music exposed and developing in many dimensions. Not only can each player be heard by himself and in shifting combinations - duet, trio or quartet - with the others, but the progression in mood and approach across an entire evening can be clearly appreciated. This is particularly marked on the second disc, where the careful exploration of the first set is succeded by the all-in surge of the second, which begins as if the four are resuming an interruped conversation. From the first night to the last, the music played over these three nights is of the highest quality. What can't be captured in the discs, but should never be underestimated, is the presence of listeners whose attentiveness cleared and charged the space in which the performers could do their work of creating a music as delicate in its inner workings as it is robust in its insistance on building for itself, night after night, a world without walls." - Richard Williams. --- Audio recorded by Giovanni LaRovere. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux.

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.

An AMM concert: Lublin in Poland. A Place. Atmosphere of place pervades the music - 'place' from the latin platea and Greek plateia - 'open space'. Open space is what AMM thrives on. Open - as in uncongested. Open - as in receptive. Open - as in enquiring. New open spaces offer new challenges. Acoustics too are different, as is the piano and the percussion. Materially they can be different Sense of place is also coloured by cultural context. Eastern Poland has its history and expectations. We have ours. So, as we place our sounds into their space we have to live and support our own artistic axioms. Such an offering may be a foreign invasion - an imposition upon another place. Or, it can be a musical proposal to potential friends. A poetic whisper of what may be possible in human creativity and affairs.  --- Eddie Prévost / percussion John Tilbury / piano  --- Tracklisting: 1. Lublin - 1:00:01 --- Lublin was recorded at CODES — The festival of Traditional and Avant-garde Music — Lublin, Poland on 16th May 2012. Recorded by Jaroslaw Rudnicki. Mixed and mastered by Sebastian Lexer. Artwork 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.

"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

This is the fourth recording made availiable ina series of concerts at The Network Theatre, Waterloo, London, in which Eddie Prévost invited notable saxophonists to make music with him.  --- Bertrand Denzler / tenor saxophone John Edwards / double bass Eddie Prévost / drums --- Recorded at The Network Theatre, Waterloo, on the 12th December 2011. Special thanks to the theatrical custodians of The Network Theatre and especially Keith Wait - for being so positively disposed for this series. Recorded by Giovanni La Rovere. Mixed and edited by John Butcher. Cover artwork by Tom Mills. Design by Myah Chun.

This is the third recording made availiable in a series of concerts at The Network Theatre, Waterloo, London, in which Eddie Prévost invited notable saxophonists to make music with him.  --- Jason Yarde / alto and soprano saxophone Oli Hayhurst / double bass Edwin (Eddie) Prévost / drums --- Recorded at The Network Theatre, Waterloo, on the 7th August 2011. Special thanks to the theatrical custodians of The Network Theatre and especially Keith Wait - for being so positively disposed for this series. Recorded by Giovanni La Rovere. Mixed and edited by John Butcher. Cover artwork by Tom Mills. Design by Myah Chun.

"It is easy to throw the usual rapturous applause at anything AMM do, but there isn’t a more fully refined and explored musical relationship than Prévost and Tilbury’s, and while I seek and desire newly broken ground in how music sounds or is made as much as anyone there is still room to admire and celebrate the way two masters at their particular art go about creating something this thoughtful and beautiful.  While familiarity breeds recognisable patterns and musical traits AMM continue to make music that oozes tension, beauty, anger, aggression and a vitality that is perpetuates itself in a thoroughly, nakedly human manner, and that’s enough for me." - The Watchful Ear (Richard Pinnell) --- John Tilbury / piano Eddie Prévost / percussion --- E1 was recorded at The Rag Factory, Spitalfields, London on Sunday the 6th of March, 2011 at the 'As Alike as Trees' festival of improvised music. SE1 was recorded at a concert given at The Purcell Room, London, on Sunday the 27th of November, 2011. It was part of 'The Engine Room', Morley College's Festival and Conference celebrating the life, works and legacy of Cornelius Cardew.

"Acoustic instrumentation at its most traditional meets digital processes even as they are still being developed. The warmth of a vibrating string meets itself mirrored back altered significantly by computer transformation. Keys sometimes depressed, at other times they sit untouched, bypassed my musicians leaning over them. Old ways of doing things meet new ways." - The Watchful Ear --- Sebastian Lexer / piano + Christoph Schiller / spinet --- Recorded by Giovanni La Rovere and Tom Mudd at As Alike As Trees Festival, 2011, The Rag Factory, London. Mixed and mastered by Sebastian Lexer. Design by Myuh Chun.

The second recording made in a series of concerts at The Network Theatre, Waterloo, London, in which Eddie Prévost invited notable saxophonists to make music with him.  --- John Butcher / tenor and soprano saxophones Guillaume Viltard / double bass Eddie Prévost / drums  --- Recorded at the Network Theatre, Waterloo, London, on the 1st August 2011 by Giovanni Le Rovere. Mixing and editing by John Butcher. Cymbol photography by Tom Mills. Design my Myuh Chun.  --- Review in Point of Departure: The first part of the three-part suite opens up with tuned toms, and moves quickly into popping, lip-smacking sax and burbling pizzicato, making for a good old free jazz romp for starters. Amidst the nicely heated metal and woody thwacks, you can hear Butcher digging into some of his most audibly saxophonic playing (to call it conventional, even though there are lines and intervals, would be overstating things). But there’s also such a sheerly avian quality, at times evolving into a menacing spitfire, that you forget those previous passages altogether as overtones proliferate. There are also some extraordinary moments in the second part, where Butcher seems to reduce the soprano to pure whizzing sound, with no breaks in the sound, only a massive metallic whistle that occasionally boils down into burrs and grumbles. I have to confess that there are moments when (partly owing to his place in the mix) Vitard sounds a bit inconsequential; and in the hot exchanges to begin “part 3” it’s clear that the sympathy between Butcher and Prévost is where the action is. But thankfully the bassist subsequently proves me wrong with a truly sizzling arco solo – bold and confessional at once – midway through the 28-minute closing section.
– Jason Bivins

Leveraging the concept of the geometrically impossible Penrose Triangle, the trio of Sebastian Lexer (piano), Eddie Prevost (percussion) and Seymour Wright (sax) perform three permutations of duos and one full trio. --- "On Impossibility In Its Purest Form, the trio of Prévost with prepared pianist Lexer and saxophonist Wright 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 Liminal "Each performance begin in nothingness, eventually finds a kind of convergence, then elongates that moment, stretching it in time and space until there is room in one’s awareness for little else. In a sense dauntingly abstract, the work is also visceral, with both Wright (he can sound like a duck without being specifically mimetic) and Prévost exploring harsh reed and bowed metal sounds, in contrast to the refined and unpredictable little sounds that Lexer seems to prefer. That 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." - Point of Departure --- Recorded at The Welsh Chapel, Southwark Bridge Road, London in July and October 2011.

This is the first recording made in a series of concerts at The Network Theatre, Waterloo, London, in which Eddie Prévost invited notable saxophonists to make music with him.  --- John Edwards / double bass Evan Parker / tenor saxophone Eddie Prévost / drums  --- Recorded at the Network Theatre, Waterloo, London, on the 30th May 2011 by Giovanni Le Rovere. Mixing and editing by John Butcher. Cymbol photography by Tom Mills. Design my Myuh Chun.  --- Review:   The first was All Told with arch-bassist John Edwards and the huge and brilliant breath of the Bristolian tenor saxophonist Evan Parker. “I want life!” exclaims Prevost of his endless quest for improvisation in the album’s sleeve notes, and “a metamusical approach; one which revels in personal discovery and surprises as well as being sensitive and active towards incoming signals from others.” It is a commentary and metaphor for art as life, and this record is full with it, the three musicians playing as an amalgam, unifying their powerful technical dexterity with an intense and reflective beauty, humanity and generosity towards each other and their listeners. Edwards’s musical mastery is also in every way remarkable, as if he is the pulse of all that we hear, while Parker’s assertion of breath-with-end gives us a simile, an onomatopoeia of continuing life and hope enveloped in aural radiance. As for Prevost, in his drums is an insistence of the real, of the touching, tapping, hammering, striking, pounding, ringing of the detail of work and action which is everywhere in our lives, in every second, awake or asleep, the sonic edge of production. Like his Huguenot forebears, he works in a world of workshops: but his workshops are the workshops of drums.   Chris Searle — Morning Star 26th January, 2016

"Five men walk on stage, two carry saxophones, one a guitar, the pianist and drummer sit down at their instruments. It looks like a conventional notion of a band, the sole concession to the world of electronics the Gibson Les Paul, itself a guitar design that has changed little in the past sixty years. Every instrument carries with it the expectation of a characteristic envelope, the attack and decay of individual sounds. And then Hubbub starts to play and that visual presence remains in place, almost a tableau, as warm reminder and comforting insistence on the acoustic experience and the tradition of watching people play musical instruments rather than laptops, oscillators, synths and sampling machines. In Hubbub's hands every technique for the typically discrete sound is regularly exchanged for a drone." - Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure.  --- Frédéric Blondy / piano Bertrand Denzler / tenor saxophone Jean-Luc Guionnet / alto saxophone Jean-Sébastien Mariage / electric guitar Edward Perraud / drums & percussion --- Recorded in concert at Festival Muzzix, La Malterie, Lille, France on April 23rd 2010 & at Carré Bleu, Poitiers, France on February 12th 2010.

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.

"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.