"Blue" Gene Tyranny

On The Other Hand is going to some fairly excellent places too :)

Man the second half of this is amazing too! All the Kathy Acker stuff is killer

Alas

Rest in Power “Blue” Gene Tyranny. 1945-2020. https://t.co/TShbUCwCyV pic.twitter.com/ocstaRtGMS

— Unseen Worlds (@Unseen_Worlds) December 12, 2020

RIP

:(

RIP. I just happened to receive Country Boy Country Dog in the post yesterday. A sad coincidence. I will be playing Take Your Time and that in his honour.

RIP, just discovered and fell in love with “without warning” this year

Next Time Might Be Your Time on repeat all day

Why doesn't Next Time Might Be Your Time win every single 'best song ever' poll?

― imago, Monday, November 19, 2018 4:18 AM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's a really hard song to stop listening to.

This one hurts! First 2020 death to get to me - miss you already, Blue. Gonna spin Out of the Blue and maybe revisit Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives to pay respect to the world’s greatest piano player!

i listened to Out Of The Blue in full earlier after hearing this, NTMBYT just loaded with unspeakable amounts of pathos

Yeah huh NTMBYT really might be one of the best songs of the 70’s

Raising a glass ("we don't serve fine wine in half pints, Buddy") in memory of "Blue" while watching the boogie woogie piano lessons: http://ubuvideo.memoryoftheworld.org/Ashley-Robert_Perfect-Lives_4_The-Bar-Differences.mp4

thanks for sharing that.

what a week. friend MCS just texted me 'why god hate piano players'. I still have my Budd CDs on the listening table. they go mysteriously well with the Tyranny stack; it actually took a lot of courage to write music this shamelessly pretty

I hear Tyranny finalized track choices for a six disc set of mostly live recordings still in the pipeline.

going backwards chronological. 'The Intermediary' hit really really hard today.

RIP. We're not attached or separate in space.

Of course he was five when out of the blue he started to speak Polish and recall his past lives.

Never listened to this record until yesterday.

Said leave all that history behind

Missed this and just noticed with the six back to back tracks on Jesse Dorris' Polyglot this morning - RIP

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/blue-gene-tyranny-1945-2020
which links to
https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/35016/page/37

The recording of "Leading a Double Life" on "Trust in Rock" is one of the most frustrating recordings I've ever listened to. It has all the potential to be as great as the version on "Out of the Blue" but it's underrehearsed or something - you can hear the singer struggling to keep time with the band. But in spite of the frustration I keep listening because it's such a moving song nonetheless.

That said, the "Trust in Rock" version of "Next Time Might Be Your Time" is so good that all is forgiven.

RIP Blue "Gene". "Out of the Blue" is up there in the pantheon.

And "Private Parts", a contender for my favourite recording of anything by anyone, couldn't have existed without him.

Unseen Worlds has just announced a six CD box set

https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/degrees-of-freedom-found

ah ned this is great thank you for writing it

https://thequietus.com/articles/30056-blue-gene-tyranny-review

stuffed to overflowing, and kind of impossible to climb on top of -- each of Tyranny's albums is just as schizophrenic, you never knew exactly what you were you going to get but whenever he put out something new you knew it'd be 'an album' with a through-line. and this... schizoid, total compilation resetting the clock with a new totally different thing every 5-15 minutes. all the mid-length compositions or one-offs that would have disrupted the flow of any single disc album, well here's six discs worth of them. it takes some focus and parsing, but like all his stuff the best instants hit you without warning

the main thing is finally getting a full performance of his opera, 'The Driver's Son', the one everyone always mentioned as his best thing, and which of course he'd never released (except in excerpts, without the vocals). Tyranny's so integral to Ashley's best operas, so if you've ever wondered why he never seemed to follow up 'A Letter From Home' with something on a larger scale, well this is it. I sure wish there could have been a studio version -- this version's compiled from two live performances in a very self-conscious way (I've heard the work was very different on different nights, so in a way the splice makes a kind of sense beyond presenting an 'ideal' version). it's totally trance inducing music with a stream of consciousness anti-narrative over the top with the occasional completely impossible sentence, the opera is the thing at the center of this box

Can’t read right now but looks great, thanks.

it is indeed a fine write-up. will tackle the full release at some point soon :)

ah ned this is great thank you for writing it

You're most welcome of course. I was taking a bit of a leap writing about areas where my familiarity is less than others, but I'm glad to know via your comments and others I've heard it read well.

*bump*

i've got this set sitting on my desk but haven't found the right headspace to dig in. beautiful box design tho!