AMM

AMM is a British free improvisation group that was founded in London, England, in 1965. The group was initially composed of Keith Rowe on guitar, Lou Gare on saxophone, and Eddie Prévost on drums. The three men shared an interest in exploring music beyond the boundaries of conventional jazz, as in free jazz and free improvisation. AMM has never been popular but has been influential in improvised music. Most of their albums have been released by Matchless Recordings, which was run by Eddie Prévost. In a 2001 interview, Keith Rowe was asked if "AMM" was an abbreviation. He replied, "The letters AMM stand for something, but as you probably know it's a secret!"

"AMM music may initially seem impenetrable, but it sure as hell penetrates you. Soon the desired state is instilled in the listener; a rapt vacancy somewhere between supreme concentration and utter absentmindedness." - Melody Maker

On AMMMusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew's purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music. AMM's clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, AMM 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

Eddie Prévost / percussion, Keith Rowe / electric guitar and transistor radio, John Tilbury / Piano

FORMANEX

From it's creation, in 1997 FORMANEX ensemble was interested in the production of new musical forms in the contemporary music.
This direction, follows the continuity of the history of the experimental music. Formanex is composed of three members, each from different musical backgrounds: electroacoustic music, improvised music, experimental music, sound art, sound poetry, punk, rock'n'roll, noise and jazz.

The early works of Formanex falls between improvisation and composition, taking graphic elements as a starting point. Two of the members, then student in artschool brought a reflexion towards creating music on the boundaries of visual arts.
The influence of electroacoustic music and the visual arts led Formanex to develop spatialisation works, thought of in terms of interventin-performance in a given situation. The cross over of these approaches engaged a radical change to their instrumentation during the first years reheasing together. This change opened up new artistic routes.
Whereby the instrument is central to the musician, but the musician adapts, invents, and rebuilds his instrument according to the needs' of his musical thought.

In 2000, two of the members of the group along with musician KEITH ROWE (one of the founders of the improvised music group AMM) intrduced them to graphical scores. Scores for determining the evolution of the group, such as: “TREATISE”, a graphic composition by CORNELIUS CARDEW.

Anthony Taillard (guitar, electronics), Julien Ottavi (Percussion, laptop, electronics)

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