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For more than a year before The Beatles recorded this track, McCartney had been playing at his home in Cavendish Avenue with tape loops on Tomorrow Never Know] and musique concrète, as well as experimenting with montage home movies. He knew the music of AMM, a free jazz trio founded in 1965 who often performed in darkness, incorporating randomly scanned broadcasts by 'playing' transistor radios and McCartney clearly had this sort of music in mind during the recording of Carnival of Light. The major discovery of his interaction with the mid-Sixties classical and jazz avant garde was 'random' - the realisation that chance elements, with which The Beatles had already casually toyed, could produce striking results when actually sought after. The difference was that AMM - following the contemporary ideal of transcending the ego [as in Tomorrow Never Knows] - specialised in a sensitive form of collective improvisation in which players not only listened intently to each other but interacted spontaneously with everything around them, including their audiences. In Carnival of Light, The Beatles merely bashed about at the same time, overdubbing without much thought, and relying on the Instant Art effects of tape-echo to produce something suitably 'far-out.' That said, it would be unfair to expect anything much more considered, given that, unlike Revolution 9 which took five days, Carnival of Light was knocked off quickly as an informal commission for a 'mixed-media' event held on 28 January and 4th February 1967 at the Roundhouse Theatre in Camden Town, North London.
- Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records of the Sixties, 1998
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