Apogee

The first CD features a joint recording of the six musicians of Musica Eletttronica Viva and AMM together: Alvin Curran, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum and John Tilbury. It was recorded April 30th 2004. The 2nd CD contains separate performances that MEV and AMM gave at the 'Freedom of the City' festival, London on May 1st 2004. "After the generally low dynamic levels and relatively slow pace of the AMM trio set on 1 May, the MEV trio opened with the blast of Alvin Curran playing the sho far, a trumpet made from a ram's horn, a 'defiantly primitive', prototypical music, fit to leave the walls of the Conway Hall, like some new Jericho, pitched down fiat. If I spoke earlier of the way in which AMM might deal, in Reeve and Kerridge's phrase, with the internal, microscopically-enlarged body surface which becomes a landscape -- and the same is true of some of Teitelbaum and Curran's quieter use of radically pitch-shifted and extended samples -- particularly that ululating operatic-theatrical voice, coming to sound almost like something from AMM's label-mates FURl -- then this is the extrovert mode, which refuses any easy accommodations. Which division is inherent; as Bourdieu explains, the culture which unifies via the medium of communication is also the culture which separates via the culture of distinction, and which legitimates distinctions. It may be, as Adorno remarks, that a work of art is great insofar as it registers a failed attempt to reconcile such objective antinomies; failure then being in the highest sense the measure of success.