The group that wrote the rulebook for free improvisation: a London collective of scraped guitar, transistor radios and prepared sound, and through Keith Rowe's tabletop guitar an ancestor of the noise tradition.
AMM is the British free-improvisation group the Bureau files at Tier I as the ensemble that, more than any other, set out the terms of non-idiomatic improvised music. It was founded in London in 1965 by Keith Rowe on guitar, Lou Gare on saxophone and Eddie Prévost on percussion, three musicians out of the city's free-jazz scene who wanted to get past the jazz idiom entirely. Lawrence Sheaff joined, and in 1966 so did the composer Cornelius Cardew.
What they arrived at was a music of enquiry rather than of style. Cardew described the practice as "searching for sounds," and the group improvised with no recourse to scores and no interest in emulating any existing form. The materials were scraped and bowed guitar, transistor radios tuned to whatever was on the air, prepared piano, saxophone and percussion, assembled in real time into long, listening, unrepeatable sessions. There was, unusually, no leader and no spontaneous imitation of other musics; the sound-world was its own.
The lasting technical bequest is Keith Rowe's. He laid his electric guitar flat and played it as a table, working it with radios, files, bows and other objects, treating the instrument as a surface of sound rather than a fretted neck. That tabletop-guitar idea runs straight forward into the work of Kevin Drumm, the electroacoustic-improv field and the noise tradition at large this archive files, and it is one of the clearest single lines from the 1960s avant-garde to the present.
Their debut, AMMMusic (1966), was recorded by Jac Holzman for Elektra, the same label then issuing The Doors, which placed the record at a precise meeting point between the avant-garde and the countercultural underground. It was among the first attempts to carry noise improvisation, radios and scraped guitar into a popular catalogue, and it still sounds strange. Cardew, for his part, had joined partly to find players for his graphic score Treatise, found in AMM a fully democratic setting, and later formed the Scratch Orchestra from the same conviction that anyone could make this music, before the Maoist turn that ended his experimental period.
AMM were never known to the general public, but their influence is wide and well attested, named by Derek Bailey, Brian Eno, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman among others. Most of their records came out on Matchless Recordings, the label Prévost ran, and the group continued through changing line-ups, often with the pianist John Tilbury, until 2022.
The Bureau files AMM at Artists · Tier I as the foundational free-improvisation group and, through Rowe's flat guitar, a direct ancestor of the noise-and-improv lineage.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the postwar · last revised c. the Anthropocene