Eddie Prévost

A founder-member of AMM (1965-2022)

“[Eddie Prévost’s] is one of the greatest metallurgists that music has produced. […] sparks delicately arcing through the air, of slow lava ingesting its surroundings, of the shifting grind of tectonic plates across each other, of the rustle and glint of a firebird darting between shadows, and of ore smashing into the surface of the earth; but perhaps this language is overwrought: all that needs to be remarked upon is Prévost's industry, his diligence.”
Nathan Moore — liner note to AMM’s ‘Indúsria’
Matchless Recordings mrcd105.

But beyond this work Prévost has also maintained a relationship with the jazz drum-kit.

“His free drumming flows superbly making perfect use of his formidable technique, but his most startling feature is his stylelessness. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or a Max Roach.” - review of a set with saxophonist Lou Gare, Melody Maker (27.03.1975)

“Prévost, meanwhile, was simply miraculous; it was fascinating to watch him and to compare his approach with that of a Kern or a Nilssen-Love. I can only say that he was possessed of an uncanny, burning intentness that navigated the ensemble through passages of stark, sculpted beauty, grave concentration and full-on, bristling energy.”
Blue Tomato, Vienna 2012. In concert with Marilyn Crispell and Harrison Smith. Richard Rees-Jones

“An excellent release from one of the finest percussionists around, jazz or otherwise.” review of Prévost’s solo CD ‘Collider’
Matchless Recordings mrcd106 – Brian Olewnic, Squidsear (2022).

“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star

John Tilbury

John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.

Video by Helen Petts

Christian Wolff

Christian Wolff emerged in the 1950s on the New York experimental music scene and became a prominent champion of the aesthetics of musical indeterminism. His works, which became increasingly explicit in their political content as his career progressed, stress choice, artistic co-operation and interdependence, and an accommodating attitude toward the potential relationships between music, sound and silence. Wolff studied classics and comparative literature at Harvard University. Though active as a pianist and electric guitarist throughout his career, he was largely self-taught as a composer, and from the beginning his works relied more on careful aesthetic design than compositional “craft” in the traditional sense. Although his works of the 1950s already conveyed a decidedly “democratic” subtext, with their reliance on freedom and reaction (“parliamentary participation”), they did so through traditional notation and sometimes invoked, however obscurely, traditional forms. The flexibility of their realisations owed to Cage’s influence, while their sparse surfaces recalled Webern, and in some cases resonated with La Monte Young’s early works. His compositions from the late 1950s and 1960s placed increased effort on real-time cooperation between performers, who worked somewhat freely, within certain set parameters (set durations with unspecified pitches, for example), but were required to alter their performative decisions consequent to each other’s actions. Later works turned inwards to more specifically musical topics, perhaps due in part to Wolff’s somewhat self-effacing assessment of the composer’s role. As he observed in a 1991 interview: “Most political music, paradoxically enough, is for the converted; it’s an instrument of cohesion for a group that already knows what it wants.” – Jeremy Grimshaw, Allmusic