AMM: Meta Machine Music

Three men, grey haired, have been making sound for more than an hour. At the rear of the place: sentinels, guarding wine. Lull towards the end of - how long? Five minutes? Ten? - of a solitary shimmering frequency from a flat disc of brass, drifting into near silence. Suddenly, at the front of the block of listeners, footsteps: an acolyte needs more wine. Loud, echoing, penetrating, they raise the noise-floor by a decibel at least. Within their cowl of noise, which will continue for at least as long again before it ceases, the three men smile to each other. In the ritual, there are no words.

But it is only a ritual to the watchers. For AMM, up there on the platform, this is precisely not the reconstruction of a myth. This music first attained escape velocity 30 years ago now, and seems less likely than ever to cease: this music that takes root in a bed of silence, sprouts into life from the barest detectible trace elements, evolves intelligence and becomes articulate, expands until it becomes too dense for its own structrure to bear, collapses back on itself into new silence and new shape, and tries the cycle again.

Eddie Prévost, drummer, longest continuous group member and chronicler of the band's recorded moments through his record label Matchless, once made the most often-repeated comment about AMM: "AMM music existed a few minutes before we thought of it." Having reached this convenient, yet arbitrary 30th anniversary, it feels as though the music exists whether they think of it or not, which must be seen as some kind of success.

"That's right, it is," says Keith Rowe from his home in France. "Certainly what I do on the guitar is there without me playing it. I hear it all the time. In a sense, a great preparation for becoming a percussion player in AMM - and maybe all AMM players are percussion players - would be being in a restaurant and you hear that clatter of the washing up: that incredible variation, and it's incredibly specific to what it is... If you could actually play like that it would be wonderful."

Trying to assimilate those 30 years of music making is like trying to map a coastline accurately: impossible to find a single unit of measurement small enough to account for every twist and curve, every doubling-back of the shore. You can apply that metaphor equally to the texture of the sound they make as to the hisotry of the group and its fluctuating membership. At this distance, the curves inevitably smoothen out; even the records and CDs aren't the helpful nodes they can be in tracing the paths of artists whose careers are more obsessively plotted: instead AMM recordings are like snapshots, leaving the imagination to fill in all the other sounds, the thoughts and the lives in between. Furthermore, on the occasion of this article, Eddie pronounced himself perfectly satisfied and enthusiastic about the group's progress, before declining to be interviewed at length. His collected thoughts are due to appear in a book to be published in the near future.