robert ashley

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?!?

Can't wait for Gann's book.

Carl's still president over at the bank, ain't he?

What's that Ashley opera set at the airport, with the couple who've had the fight in Mexico or wherever and they're both leaving, and the voices are all treated? I sort of regret not buying that when I saw it used, now.

I think that one is "Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)" maybe? I'm not super familiar with it tbh.

Yeah, Don Leaves Linda. Not sure what the hang up at the listening station was. It's weird when art hooks you long after you've rejected it. I remember doing that with this early-ish Kundera story, recently. You don't even realize how fundamental something is until you go away and it comes back to you under your hypnagogic state.

disc 2 of Improvement is where it catches fire. disc 2 track 4/5, 'The Doctor' / 'The Offering Of Images', that's one of my all time favorite Ashley pieces. and 'Tarzan', that's a truly strange song.

'in that pwermanent state of wapture you are mentally OK'

has this been posted before?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWBB3KgAk94

new Ashley book out 12/15/09: "Outside of Time"
http://www.lovely.com/books/bookslist.html#anchor1307922

Q'est-ce que c'est?????

more great posts as he moves towards the book

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2010/02/the_curse_of_the_recital.html
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2010/02/erasing_the_timeline.html

http://lovely.com/titles/cd3303.html

god the new one is really something

definitely the most straightforward one in a little while as far as the narratives are concerned, and hamilton's music really fits with it this time around

I saw Ashley & Humbert perform the last two of these live at Mills about ten years ago. but the first piece is so disjointed and crazy it might even be my favorite, his voice has gotten so strange, the sound of someone drifting off to sleep at the end of every single sentence he speaks

what's the new one?

its a sequel (?) to atalanta, i havent heard it.

plax linked it -- evidently Atalanta is staged with modular stories which are faded up and down at different moments, making every performance slightly different, and the new album is 3 of the complete stories presented all the way through.

before this one, I liked 'Foreign Experiences' the most of all the ones he's put out in the last 10 years -- it's really paranoid, has a high density of memorable lines -- though that one's more a Sam Ashley showcase than a Robert one. and 'Now Eleanor's Idea' takes a bit of work, but by the end of the last 20 minute piece, it really pays off. 'Dust', 'Celestial Experiences' & 'Concrete' are all kind of samey ensemble operas with good moments but some of the musical settings just kind of snap me out of the mood

the new one though, played it four times in the last week already

ok, i wasn't sure if you were talking about the same release.

but atalanta 2 seems to be parts of the original opera that didn't make it on to disc first time around so are they new recordings or old?

i haven't loved any of them after Improvement, and i really loved that, although i liked bits and pieces.

bits and pieces of the stuff that came after that, i mean.

the stories date from the original opera but these are new recordings

though they're very very similiar to the versions I remember from the Mills concert 10 years ago -- might be exactly the same backing music. but you can tell these are recent recordings, ashley has never sounded this diffuse. or... old, basically

it's odd how my favorite two of the recent deluge of Ashley sets have been the ones that showcase other performers, Sam Ashley & Joan LaBarbara, so even on those, you kind of feel like something's missing (i.e. Bob). but the first disc on the new one is ALL about his voice. the second disc of the new one is mostly a Jacqueline Humbert showcase, even most of the stories clearly come from her, but Ashley's punchlines every few seconds are the glue

Somehow I thought "Improvement" was much later than it was. Scratch my previous point about not loving anything that came after it.

Milton, does the section known as "flying Saucer Dialogue" (which was on the "Music from Mills"compilation) turn up on this new release? i absolutely love that. who is the woman on that?

-Particles of what?
-Paticles of the subject, Sir
-Coming up through the monitors?
...
-Where is it now?
-Who knows?
-That tone is not allowed, Lieutenant
-I'm sorry, Sir
-The answer then?
-It comes and goes...
-Intermittent?
-Precisely, Sir

no, that's just another bizarre satellite track. the woman is a very young jacqueline humbert, and the keyboards / sound design is paul shorr so that track is kind of like a trial run for the original recording of atalanta in 1985

Flying Saucer has come to Earth for important information concerning humans: The Marriage of Atalanta. Problem: Apples.

d'oh, her.

― ian, Thursday, 16 July 2009 02:23 (1 year ago)

yeah, i've become near-obsessed with ashley in the past year and a half; this is pretty welcome right now.

― mike powell, Saturday, September 15, 2007 6:08 AM (3 years ago)

world = small

very titantically.

i mean... titanically.

you know you've got to hold me tighter yeah

closer?

In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women

this totally kicked my ass at work this morning around 8 A.M.

i always think it would be fun to rerecord sarah mencken replacing the names w/ my friends names

o_O where do you work?

haha it was on my iPod, just playing shuffle in the AM - I work by myself for most of my shift.

I found Private Parts, Perfect Lives (Private Parts): The Bar, Automatic Writing, and Perfect Lives (Private Parts): Music Word Fire And I Would Do It Again (Coo Coo) at the community radio station I volunteer at. Kind of overwhelmed with Ashley at the moment. I listened to all of them (in the order above) last night. Automatic Writing was my least favorite, but I was listening to it pretty quietly cuz I didn't want to bug my neighbors upstairs. Maybe if I cranked it up I would like it more. The other three pretty much floored me. The increasing complexity from record to record really engaged me, I was expecting them to all sound like Private Parts. But The Bar immediately destroyed that impression. It's really psychedelic. I felt altered just listening to it. And then Music Word Fire sounded like some lost Arthur Russell underground dance jam.

It's all pretty much brand new to me. I've just looked up his discography and see that I've only been exposed to a small portion of it. I've heard Tyranny's Out of the Blue and The Intermediary, but it is pretty clear that there is a whole lot more music to discover out of this "scene" for lack of a better word.

love the bar!

I know my thing is to complain about shit I didn't go to but I missed him when he came to providence this year, I think elmo went tho?

here's a tv series ashley produced on the "scene" back in the 70s, see you in 14 hours

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Ashley.php

Thanks!

Truly love Robert Ashley; one of my all-time heroes. Saw him a few years back performing with his ensemble three nights in a row.

Trips, do you know Atalanta? That is the one that for me really kind of blows my mind. It's incredibly dense and the narrative qualities are harder to follow than ever, but it's mindblowing and gorgeous and just sounds really cool..

The Perfect Lives DVD set is highly recommended as well.

All I've heard are the four I've listed, I'll look out for Atalanta. And I definitely want to see the DVDs, the records themselves are so cinematic.
I am going to watch some of those videos from the link that Ed posted, too, but my home computer is on the fritz and I probably shouldn't watch them at work.
Though it is Friday...

atalanta is really amazing, and the whole LOVELY MUSIC scene is pretty high-qual. there's a few duds ive heard, but like david behrman, pauline oliveros, blue gene tyranny, eliane radigue, gordon mumma, etc etc etc, all so good.

saw FOREIGN EXPERIENCES (from 86 or something?) a few weeks ago at mills with RA in attendance. that one is super-intense, and the whole experience of seeing it performed live was amazing. kind of like i felt when i watched INLAND EMPIRE, i was physically drained upon leaving, in a really good way.

Can't wait to play some of it on the air. This is the kind of thing that would stop me in my tracks if I heard it on the radio first.
It's also nice to have a cache of "really long tracks that are awesome" for when you need a break.

i play the park/the backyard to close my show at least a few times per year... such beautiful music. it blows my mind that more people are not totally in love with the work of Robert Ashley.

First time I heard Robert Ashley was on the radio when the DJ played "Mila's Journey Inspired By a Dream" and it blew my mind

I played side one of The Bar last night. Sounded great. Haven't gotten any listener comments, though. I found a compilation record with the piece "She Was a Visitor" on it at the station. I just now found a copy of the Sonic Arts Union comp lp with the Ashley piece "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" as well as pieces by Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma at the academic library where I am employed. I also found some Leonardo Music Journal cd's (WTF had no idea that was an actual thing) as well as the Robert Ashley cd "Superior Seven."
Can't wait to clock out, go home, and crank these up.

If i was from the big town I would be calm and debonair

"purposeful lady slow afternoon" is so unpleasant..