AMM
“Combine + Laminates + Treatise” (1984)

“A re-issue of the Pogus LP format with additional material taken from the same concert at the Arts Club, Chicago, USA, 25th May 1984
The difference in the music included on this CD version is the addition of Treatise 84. This, as the audience was aware, was an improvisation inspired and guided, rather than dictated or controlled by Cornelius Cardews graphic masterpiece. There is, of course, no way that this work could be identified as a composition in the accepted sense. There is no universal correlation between the symbols on the page and the sounds the musicians make. Cardew gave no indications as to what any of his graphics might represent. Later, in the Treatise Handbook he offered thoughts upon how such a musical engagement might develop. Nothing however was prescriptive.
Dated entry in Treatise Handbook :
5th January 1966. Joining AMM was the turning point, both in the compositions of Treatise and in everything I have thought about music up to now. Before that Treatise had been an elaborate attempt at graphic notation of music (which I can only describe as a graphic score that produces in the reader, without any sound, something analogous to the experience of music), a network of nameless lines and spaces pursuing their own geometry untethered to themes and modulations, 12 note series and their transformations, the rules or laws of musical composition and all the other figments of the musicological imagination.” Eddie Prévost