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**The Crypt - 12th June 1968**
★★★★☆

In the summer of 1968, while the world convulsed with revolution and rock'n'roll was discovering its own rebellious voice, a small group of British musicians was quietly dismantling the very foundations of what music could be. AMM—the cryptically named collective that emerged from London's avant-garde underground—had already spent three years pushing sound into uncharted territories when they descended into the basement of the Royal College of Art for what would become one of their most essential documents: "The Crypt - 12th June 1968."

The album captures AMM at a pivotal moment in their evolution. Formed in 1965 by percussionist Eddie Prévost, guitarist Keith Rowe, and saxophonist Lou Gare, the group had been methodically deconstructing jazz, classical, and electronic music conventions with the surgical precision of sonic archaeologists. By 1968, they had refined their approach to collective improvisation into something that transcended genre entirely—a form of musical telepathy that operated on frequencies most bands couldn't even detect.

What makes "The Crypt" so compelling isn't just its historical significance as a document of free improvisation's early days, but the way it captures lightning in a bottle. The album consists of two extended pieces that unfold with the patience of geological time, yet bristle with an underlying tension that keeps listeners perpetually off-balance. This isn't background music for dinner parties—it's music that demands your complete attention while simultaneously making you question what attention itself means.

Keith Rowe's approach to guitar on these recordings remains revolutionary even by today's standards. Laying his instrument flat and treating it as a sound laboratory rather than a melodic vehicle, he coaxes otherworldly textures from strings, pickups, and amplifier feedback. His use of radio as a compositional element—letting fragments of BBC broadcasts bleed into the mix—predates sampling culture by decades and creates an eerie sense of the outside world intruding on the group's hermetic sound world.

Eddie Prévost's percussion work abandons traditional rhythmic functions entirely, instead focusing on texture, space, and the acoustic properties of metal, wood, and skin. He treats his drum kit like a collection of found objects, each capable of producing sounds that exist somewhere between music and pure sonic phenomenon. Meanwhile, the contributions of other participants—the lineup varied but often included Cornelius Cardew on piano and electronics—add layers of harmonic complexity that seem to emerge from the ether itself.

The first piece, stretching across nearly forty minutes, builds from near-silence to moments of startling intensity before retreating again into whispered conversations between instruments. It's music that breathes with its own logic, expanding and contracting like some vast organic entity. The interplay between acoustic and electronic elements creates a sense of temporal displacement—you might be listening to transmissions from a distant planet or the sound of machinery slowly grinding to a halt in an abandoned factory.

The second piece operates in a more compressed timeframe but achieves an even greater sense of density. Here, AMM's collective unconscious seems to tap into something primal and unsettling. Radio static mingles with bowed cymbals and prepared piano strings to create a soundscape that feels both ancient and futuristic. It's the sound of civilization slowly dissolving and reforming itself in real time.

"The Crypt" has aged remarkably well, largely because AMM was never chasing trends or trying to fit into existing categories. Their influence can be heard in everything from ambient techno to contemporary classical composition, from experimental rock to sound art installations. Musicians like Sonic Youth, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and countless others have drawn inspiration from AMM's fearless approach to collective creation.

Today, more than five decades after its recording, "The Crypt - 12th June 1968" stands as a monument to the power of musical risk-taking. It's not an easy listen, nor is it meant to be. This is music that challenges fundamental assumptions about harmony, rhythm, and structure while opening doorways to sonic possibilities that mainstream music is still catching up to. In an era when algorithmic playlists and focus-grouped pop dominate the cultural landscape, AMM's uncompromising vision feels more necessary than ever—a reminder that the most profound musical experiences often come from the spaces between the notes rather than the notes themselves.