Product Details
AMM ‎"Ammmusic" LP
AMM ‎"Ammmusic" LP
AMM ‎"Ammmusic" LP
AMM ‎"Ammmusic" LP
Brand:Black Truffle
Product Code:BT018
weight:251.0g
Product Condition:New
16,00 € inc. tax
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Description
"Black Truffle is honoured to present the first vinyl reissue of the classic debut album from AMMAMMMusic. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowes beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the labels founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyds first manager Peter Jenner. (Pink Floyd paid tribute to AMMs influence on their improvisational sensibility with the track Flaming on their debut album, named after the piece that occupies AMMMusics first side, Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset).   

Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging British jazz avant-garde–Keith Rowe and Lou Gare had played with the great progressive big band leader Mike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare – AMM quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaf, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation Treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and Cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowes prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies.

Evan Parker famously described the improvisational logic of AMMs music as laminal, in contrast to the atomistic approach more common among the generation of British improvisers (BaileyRutherfordStevens and co.) to which he himself belonged. AMM improvised in layers: layers of sound subtly rising and falling or abruptly starting and stopping without being propelled by the implied pulse of free jazz improvisation. Rather than a pulse, AMMs music began with the sound of the room in which it was played, the Cageian anarchy of silence. By embracing the non-synchronous simultaneity of layered sound, AMM was able to create a musical container into which nearly anything could be incorporated at any moment: on AMMMusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardews purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music (and, on the LPs second side, an extended fragment of Mockingbird).

AMMs clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Where improvised music has tended to foster the development of idiosyncratic stylists who move freely from one group to another, AMM, initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on AMMMusic  the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices."

– Francis Plagne

Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M Berlin and presented in an exact replica sleeve of the original 1966 release by Stephen OMalley.

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