AMM - Fine

AMM
Fine
Matchless

Fine, named for dancer/co-creator Fine Kwiatkowski, provides a good example of both what has changed and what has remained the same in the music of the hoary British improvising ensemble known as AMM in the nearly 35 years since their inception. With the now customary line-up of John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, and Eddie Prévost, the instrumentation of piano, electronics and percussion is intact, as are the the finely honed musical instincts and sensitivities of the performers. There is also the continued practice of closely investigating the miniscule surface irregularities of the highly elongated spheres and polygons that these improvisers miraculously coax into our aural and psychic landscapes. But AMM has undergone an interesting sort of evolution too. During the first couple of decades of the group’s existence, Tilbury, Prévost, and other AMM purveyors of acoustic axes were less diffident about letting it be known what instruments they were playing. Today, the non-electronic performers are often content to add what might be called “anti-instrumental colors” to whatever lovely wash Mr. Rowe is seducing from his ever widening palette of table-top (sometimes guitar-related) electronics. In recent years, Mr. Tilbury, for example, has sometimes seemed willing to restrict his terrific improvisatory talents to two items: (i) creating perfect simulacra of Morton Feldman’s gorgeous, if not exactly pianistic, solo piano music, and (ii) emulating Calderesque wind chimes. During this same time period, Mr. Prévost has sometimes seemed to have entirely given up hitting his drums with sticks in favor of such activities as bowing their metal edges or rubbing their skins with his fingers. More generally, one could say that he has often seemed to be trying to create sounds that are indistinguishable from those more customarily produced by analogue synthesizers. It’s an increasingly odd aesthetic, this use of 18th and 19th Century concert instruments to emulate both random “wind music” and the scritches, whooshes and drones of early 20th Century electronics. This approach seems even more paradoxical in conjunction with Mr. Rowe’s regular practice of using his gear (those apparent models of modernity) to paint dream images of nature—in particular, bleak Artic landscapes. The result is like some sort of H.G. Wells outrage, born of a Kerry Blue Terrier and a bulky composite of transformers and vaccuum tubes, a beast that obsessively chases its half-flesh, half-aluminum tail. But even if the method is counter-intuitive, you can’t argue with the results. Like many of its predecessors, Fine is an exquisitely beautiful disk that could have been produced only by three brilliant musicians at the height of their powers. Magnificent.