robert ashley

hey man

I love her voice so much & the idea of Tenney / Lucier / LaBarbara / Ashley all writing cabaret songs for her always sounded great but I still haven't heard it

i finally snagged the vinyl of "Private Parts" in near mint condition for $25 off ebay. postage was pricey (from the US) but it's great to have and i consider it a bargain. The recent remaster does seem to turn down the vocal and turn up the tabla and piano and i prefer the way that one sounds. much as i love Ashley's voice i think it's too loud on the vinyl i just got.

i also got "In Sarah, Mencken..." on vinyl from discogs.

the reading of the first act of the new opera "quicksand" at roulette a couple weeks back was phenomenal. one of the best stories yet. murder, private investigators, hotels.

Can we do a top 5 Ashley LPs survery?

1. Automatic Writing
2. Private Parts
3. In Sarah, Mencken...
4. Yellow Man...
5. Private Parts/Perfect Lives: The Bar ("We can have kids... and they will speak a seamless merger.. of poetry and sound...")

can't do top 5

1. The Wolfman (LP)
2. Automatic Writing
3. In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven there were men and women
4. Private Parts (The Record)
5. Perfect Lives (Private Parts): The Bar
6. Perfect Lives (Private Parts): Music Word Fire And I Would Do It Again (Coo Coo)
7. Yellow Man With Heart With Wings

& if sides 4 & 6 of Atalanta were one LP instead of a 3 LP set, that one would have to go on as well

1. Private Parts (The Record)
2. Music Word Fire And I Would Do It Again (Coo Coo)
3. Improvement
4. Automatic Writing
5. El/Aficionado

<I>6. Perfect Lives (Private Parts): Music Word Fire And I Would Do It Again (Coo Coo) </I>

^^ the Ashley LP for post-punkers.

Also, I still haven't heard Atalanta!

1. Perfect Lives
2. Improvement
3. Automatic Writing/Yellow Man With Heart With Wings
4. Wolfman/String Quartets
5. Tap Dancing in the Sand (!)

top 5 album titles:

1. Your Money My Life Goodbye
2. Yellow Man With Heart With Wings
3. Perfect Lives
4. String Quartets Describing the Motions of Large Real Bodies
5. In Sara, Mencken, Christ, and Beethoven There Were Men and Women (also probably the real #5 in my list above)

How essential is the Perect Lives DVD set?
I have never seen it.

I've watched it all the way through once, & seen episode 3 & 7 a few times. episode 3 probably the most action packed. it's slow paced & tranced out, very funny. low low low budget, early 80's computer animation & cable access video wipes & effects. bits try your patience and then suddenly completely pay off. relentlessly animated hand gestures that seem to express the exact opposite of what he's actually saying. gold glitter in his hair & smiles at weirdest times. you just kind of have to surrender. they charge a lot for those DVDs so I haven't upgraded from my old VHS dubs, but I hear they did a great job on remastering them.

my favorite 80's video is 'Atalanta Strategy'. that one is the one that really stands up. there's a 'Music Word Fire' video I haven't seen.

ubuweb has all of 'Music With Roots in The Aether' and I watched all 14 hours on Youtube over 7 nights. I can't wait for that to come out (though I shudder to think how much Lovely would charge). The interviews with Lucier & Oliveros are good ones to start with if you're nervous about giving over that much time but I loved all of it.

The DVDs are really nice quality in terms of sound. Nearly identical to a clean VHS image quality though. My only frustration is that I'm not sure this really had to be on two DVDs. It probably all could've fit on one, with Atalanta and Music Word Fire on the other... Sigh.

I think his voice is some secret trigger to my tear ducts. Even buried in effects on Automatic Writing I feel myself welling up inside. This is something I can't help.

it is unreal.

"More like home, etc. etc. very Abstract" just the way his voice tugs at the last syllable of abstract like "abstr-act", just that little hiccough in intonation, kills me everytime.

"More like home, etc. etc. very Abstract"

are you talking about private parts (the record) or perfect lives (the opera) ik,r?

i much prefer (the record) which is my favourite record ever when i'm listening to it.

the record, I've never heard the opera version except snippets of it, and based on them I'm inclined to agree with you. That whole section, though, where he's talking about the room ("a softer bed") is my favourite. I nearly nearly spent about two hundred dollars (I doubt I woulda felt better even after the euro conversion ) on stuff off the Lovely website about an hour ago, but luckily the website freaked out.

i got (the record) on vinyl on ebay for about £12, i think. a bargain!

there was something like the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air.
there was a kind of madness to it.

the kind we read about in magazines

ik,r? i sent you a message on facebook

sorry didn't see it, i've replied!

This thread is not as in love with Sarah Mencken Christ and Beethoven as it should be, y'know, very titanically.

I can still (over-)hear him saying "This is. . . sublime. . ."

fourteen dollars and twenty-eight cents is more attractive than fourteen dollars because of the twenty-eight.

ROBERT ASHLEY: Well, the problem in discussing hip-hop with somebody who doesn't like hip-hop is that they don't hear the melodies. There's no difference in the quality of the melody in any good hip-hop record now. There are so many I can't even name them. But there's no difference in the quality of the melody between that song and something like Billie Holiday for instance. It's just that the world has changed, the street language has changed and now you have to tune our ears to be able to hear that the very best hip-hop singers are singing exactly in tune. It might be going a little too fast; the melody might be going a little too fast for you to perceive it as melody, but there's no doubt that there's melody

LOL where's Geir when you need him most?

wow

a tendency toward, MOTION PICTURES

Recent developments: I bought myself the "Perfect Lives" DVD set as a birthday present, loving it. I think I do prefer the LP versions of both The Bar & The Backyard/The Park, but the DVD really is something to see. I think some parts of it make my roommates feel weird or strange. S. is pre-occupied with the hands playing piano, hates the glitter.

Also, I just got Atalanta in the mail today. It's going to take me months to digest.

Great way to treat yrself - well done!

ian, you going? I wish I were.

http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/shows/robert-ashley-three-operas_149438/

January 15-25, 2009

holy jeeze, it looks like i have to, huh?

Three men have loved her. One a decade, on the average.

― ian, Saturday, February 23, 2008 9:04 PM (11 months ago) Bookmark

CALLING ALL LONDONERS

http://www.ica.org.uk/Robert%20Ashley%3A%20Foreign%20Experiences+19567.twl

this is on in glasgow on friday too but i've already bought tickets to see le ballets c de la b. infuriating overlap!

Yeah there was another improv gig on the same day, too - you can't win 'em all

Wow, that first link (from 4 yrs ago) still works. And is awesome.

Oh yeah its UBU web, its gonna work

Here is an Ashley interview ahead of next Wednesday's concert.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article6180594.ece

thanks for the link.
i can't wait 'til the next Ashley performance in NYC--god knows when it will be, but the last three were amazing (despite some fuck-ups on Buckner's part, but whatev.)

I'll read as many sneak preview quotes from his upcoming book on Ashley as Gann decides to post - http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2009/06/drawing_the_connections.html#comments

"The only thing that's interesting to me right now is that, up to me and a couple of other guys, music had always been about the eventfulness: like, when things happened, and if they happened, whether they would be a surprise, or an enjoyment, or something like that... It's about eventfulness. And I was never interested in eventfulness. I was only interested in sound. I mean, just literally, sound in the Morton Feldman sense.... There's a quality in music that is outside of time, that is not related to time. And that has always fascinated me... That's sort of what I'm all about, from the first until the most recent. A lot of people are back into eventfulness. But it's very boring. Eventfulness is really boring."

cool, looking forward to this!

Ooooh, had no idea this was in the works. Looks awesome.

three men have loved here--one a decade on the average.

d'oh, her.

Busted out Automatic Writing recently, man what piece. How rarely do you come across that "What's going on here?" sort of feeling.

Love this bit from Steven Stapleton:

"A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambience and the 'breathing' of the building."

Taking acid and listening to Automatic Writing is not my idea of a good time, but to each his own.

A Missing Sense is a great record! Or, I guess i have it on tape. whatever.

Three men have loved her. One a decade, on the average.

― ian, Saturday, February 23, 2008 9:04 PM (11 months ago) Bookmark

― ian, Monday, January 26, 2009 11:21 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

looking forward to Kyle Gann's book on Ashley

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2009/08/iliad_of_the_midwest.html#comments

hope he's writing this as fast as he's blogging about it, I can't wait to read it

one of his earlier blog posts mentions the first complete performance of 'Perfect Lives' at Northwestern University, the tape lost somewhere in their archives:

It was my favorite version of Perfect Lives ever, just Bob and "Blue" with a drone on a background tape, before Jill Kroesen and David Van Tieghem and a dozen other elements were added in for a kind of information overload. It was still like his "Yellow Album" that came out that year.

idea of all seven parts played live in the manner of that first LP makes me want to buy a plane ticket & offer to help them look for that tape

really looking forward to kyle's book on ashley.

this may seem weird but this article changed my life:

http://www.kylegann.com/JIreasons.html

stumbled across it as a clueless 17 year old not really wanting to pursue classical music any further. i read this and it opened up a whole new world for me.

Gann's book "American Music" is hands-down the best book on new music ever written-- very expensive, as I remember it, but one hell of a book. funnily enough, i leant it out to a professor of mine and am having dinner with her tonight, so i can finally have it with me again.

"The only thing that's interesting to me right now is that, up to me and a couple of other guys, music had always been about the eventfulness: like, when things happened, and if they happened, whether they would be a surprise, or an enjoyment, or something like that... It's about eventfulness. And I was never interested in eventfulness. I was only interested in sound. I mean, just literally, sound in the Morton Feldman sense.... There's a quality in music that is outside of time, that is not related to time. And that has always fascinated me... That's sort of what I'm all about, from the first until the most recent. A lot of people are back into eventfulness. But it's very boring. Eventfulness is really boring."

But isn't Morton Feldman's sense of sound filtered through his erm 'elastic' feel for time's passage?!?