The plan was that I would have the house to myself yesterday evening — Lucy was taking The Boy down to stay with his aunt — and then I could have played The Crypt out loud and only annoyed Louis and Phil next door. The Boy's illness scuppered that plan (as I write, his recovery is tentative — his temperature went down to the 37s from the 39s and 40s, but then up again — it seems like flu, but not swine flu), and I managed Side 1 on headphones this morning, and then Sides 2 and 3, which are quieter, over the speakers before lunch.
This is one of those records that mark out the boundaries of my collection. As in: this far, but not often, and definitely no further. Other examples? Kid 606, Fushitsusha, Farmers Manual, Conrad Schnitzler and maybe a few others that my subsconscious is repressing. The boundaries play an important role in shaping the centre. You couldn't imagine music that's more of a polar opposite to The Clientele, yet here is Alasdair from the band talking about AMM (via this Cornelius Cardew record). So there.
You couldn't call it fire-in-a-petshop music, because no one would keep creatures that make this kind of noise as pets. But I'm being flippant. I like this review with hindsight which notes how all the boundary-marking music of the last 40 years seems bounded by what takes place across these 88 minutes. I also like this range of enthusiastic listener reviews (including the cheeky "Fantastic songs, but overplay on the radio has all but ruined them for me"), which hint at the way you have to suspend all normal listening habits.
How did I arrive here? My copy is the 1988 second pressing, double LP in a box (I always had a hunch there should be more inserts than the three in my copy, and this Discogs listing confirms it, grrr). So I'd already seen AMM perform, when they played Tom Phillips' Irma in Sheffield. However, I'm not I made that connection at the time. What I remember is reading a specialist mail order catalogue in the late eighties where the writer went overboard, staking his very life on the groundbreaking importance of this album.
So I don't think the catalogue in question can have been the Matchless Recordings one, run by AMM member Eddie Prévost. Not because such claims would have been immodest from him, but because one of the inserts included in my box bullishly claims that all attempts at mechanical reproduction of AMM are useless, and that the ensemble is bound to fail, even while the terms of 'success' remain unknowable. No, I suspect the outspoken testimonial was probably by Chris Cutler of ReR.
Someone should do a coffee table book of photographs of British revolutionaries through the decades. I'd love to read Geoff Dyer or even Paul Morley on the transition from these bookish young men just leaving a seminar on Bartok to these genial pensioners.
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It must be nightmarish to have a sick child - hopefully he'll soon be back to normothermia and right as rain.
Posted by: brian | 23 January 2010 at 05:27 PM