For Rhodes piano, mini-moog synthesizer, EMS synthesizers and drums
Afghan Amplitudes was written for the group OdB in 1976. Its title is a reference to the tendency of jazz-rock super groups to call their music by rather overblown names, such as ‘Astral Artifices’. I decided to start a whole series of pieces for the group using ‘A A’ titles. Others I completed were Arcane Artefact, Aquatic Ambiences, and Arboreal Antecedents.
The scoring of Afghan Amplitudes reflects the desire to fuse together aspects of free-form live-electronic music and the rhythmic precision (and elision) of jazz-rock. I was also trying to write music with recognisable tunes in it, but which had a broad musical range and in which the tunes and the abstract textures merged into one another in a coherent musical continuum.
©1983 Tim Souster