robert ashley

:(

Sad news to wake up to. RIP

:(

:-(

RIP Mr Ashley, you made some amazing music.

didn't wanna open this thread

RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBU8vLIJbSE

I'm glad someone's finally put this version of 'The Backyard' on youtube so I can share it with everybody and maybe someone can explain to me why it kills me every time.

I know the NYT can take its time for an obit on occasion but this is getting embarrassing for them

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/arts/music/robert-ashley-opera-composer-who-painted-outside-the-lines-dies-at-83.html?_r=0

You are slain because of the tabla playing, which is virtuosic and passionate and threatens to explode out of the not-that-simple repetitive pattern but doesn't explode so much as slide around it and through it and into simpler and simultaneously more complicated patterns and because that combined with that text and Ashley's reading of it is just too fucking much.

Very titanically

My perfect introduction to Robert Ashley-- though I didn't know it was him til years later-- was in a car in San Francisco when I was 20. My older brother (then a San Franciscan) had driven me up to Muir Woods and we were stuck in traffic on the way back, all the way over the Golden Gate bridge. We channel surfing and we suddenly hit upon a station playing "Private Parts" and were too transfixed to change channels. My brother was dismissive, he said it was typical San Francisco listening. I asked him what genre it was and he said "acid jazz, I think?" (Later, when I heard real acid jazz: "if this is acid jazz, what was that talking guy?") It was so moving on first listen how such emotional highs and lows were created in such a static sonic environment. I wish I had kids so I could play this music for them

I asked him what genre it was and he said "acid jazz, I think?"

People say the funniest things part x6382462691

http://blog.frieze.com/robert-ashley-1930-2014/

Live perf of Automatic writing on the 30th at Cafe Oto (where else?).

Wanna go but it does clash with another recital :-(

I should go to that. I missed the Ashley weekend they had there in 2012 and I've been annoyed at myself since.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/05/music/four-episodes-from-robert-ashleys-vidas-perfectas
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/arts/music/vidas-perfectas-spanish-version-of-a-robert-ashley-opera.html
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/05/music/on-robert-ashley
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/arts/music/robert-ashleys-work-lives-on-at-the-whitney-biennial.html?_r=0
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/05/music/contrapunctual-music-for-spoken-words-only

I want to say something about myself:
I am not sitting on a bench next to myself, whatever that means.

started listening to the new(ish) version of Improvement and was totally floored by The Airline Ticket Counter - I never really gelled with the 1992 recording but this one seems to find an emotionally affecting quality while still being weird and not like anything else

this opera was staged in Melbourne in 1993 under the musical direction of Robert Ashley - I was visiting and picked it out of a festival programme at random as the most interesting-looking thing on offer - I was 19 and completely bemused by it but the images and atmosphere stayed with me - though I subsequently forgot the name and details - in the Internet age I made some failed attempts to work out what I had seen - then twenty years after the event I was getting into Automatic Writing and reading more about Robert Ashley and made the connection, it was a super-satisfying revelation

amazingly, there is footage of that production on the internet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaO5WMzp3OQ

Very much enjoyed this footage and your backstory, thank you

https://vimeo.com/321877684

the performance the new recording is from is on vimeo and its pretty fabulous, i watched it the other night and i am currently obsessed with the the recording. my favourite part, turning over in my head, is the description of the dance studio from 'Left-Handed Golf':
"The Arcade,
/ an enormous gallery, filled with people,
/ light filtered through the glass above,
/ two stories high, a block long,
/ without rain, perfect temperature forever
/ on stone pavements made beautiful with use.
/ A cathedral, secular, just big enough.
/ Royal chambers on the second floor.
/ Secret stairways, gold lettered windows,
/ locked doors. The studio itself,
/ vast hardwood, perfect in tongue and groove,
/ the likes of which, etcetera. The Arcade
/ builder, Worth, knew what he was up to.”

also very excited to realise that the account that published that has many full performances of later operas from the kitchen (Dust, Celestial Excursions) so worth checking for anyone who like me didn't know filmed versions existed.

Yeah, between that (absolutely wonderful) "Improvements" and the previously unreleased realization of "Foreign Experiences" that came out last year, I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I've gotten out of hearing multiple realizations of these pieces.

Looks like there's a new version of "el/Afficionado" coming later this month as well. Never really connected with that one despite the "Eleanor" cycle on the whole being some of my favorite music of any kind, so I'll be especially curious to hear it.

looking at the timing my guess is that the new production of Improvements was intended to inaugurate a celebration of ashley that has been railroaded by the thing that's railroaded everything. excited about these new recordings as i haven't heard Foreign Experiences either.

Oh! "Foreign Experiences" is maybe an acquired taste but it's one of my favorite weird corners of that cycle, absolutely saturated in the 70's west coast milieu of "divorced guys reading Castaneda", which tbf may or may not be something you're up for. Both of the versions available from Lovely are great, but I have a special fondness for the 2006 CD version that's just Sam Ashley and Jackie Humbert bc Sam's delivery is just so relentlessly freaked out and seething, boiling over with bad vibes in a way that ratchets up the psychic claustrophobia of the piece to a paranoid fever dream.

And as for the more recent productions, no idea whether there was any larger plan there but I'm really happy to see that many of the people (e.g. Tom Hamilton) who were involved with his ensemble have taken an active role in ensuring the survival of the work and mentoring another generation of interpreters.