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Your Money My Life Goodbye
An opera commissioned by Bayerisher Rundfunk Munich's Hörspiel und Medienkunst department about an internationally renowned swindler, who almost took down the European and American banking system. Featuring the voices of Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jackie Humbert, and Joan La Barbara. Recorded and mixed by Tom Hamilton. Robert Ashley on the piece: "Your Money My Life Goodbye is one of forty-nine vocal-ensemble pieces of various lengths (from ten minutes to ninety minutes or more) …
Voice is the original instrument
Pioneering extended vocal techniques from the 1970s: sensory deprivation experiments, multiphonic investigations, circular breathing adaptations. La Barbara liberates her classically trained voice to discover untapped sonic material, building orchestras from layered vocalisations. Essential document of radical vocal experimentation.
Still and moving lines of silence in families of hyperbolas
Monumental reissue of Lucier's four-part investigation into acoustic interference. Musicians sustain tones against fixed sine waves, creating audible beat patterns that reveal the hidden architecture of sound itself
Crossings
Three works investigating interference between instruments and oscillators. When closely tuned tones sound together, their oscillations create audible beats that spin through space. Lucier reveals acoustic phenomena through minimal means
Now Eleanor's Idea
2007 release. Now Eleanor's Idea was made possible by grants from The Rockefeller Foundation (1984 and 1993), the National Endowment for the Arts' Opera Musical Theater Program (1985) and InterArts Program (1992). Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea is a quartet of short operas based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. At the same time, each opera is an allegory, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), for an individual's self-realization within the co…
Dust
Dust is an opera by Robert Ashley and Yukihiro Yoshihara (video direction) whose imaginary setting is a street corner anywhere in the world, where those who live on the fringes of society gather to talk, to each other and to themselves, about life-changing events, missed opportunities, memory, loss, and regret. Five "street people" recount the memories and experiences of one of their group, a man who has lost his legs in some unnamed war. As part of the experience of losing his legs, he began a …
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) is the first of four operas about the "American" consciousness. The tetralogy, including Foreign Experiences, eL/Aficionado and Now Eleanor's Idea, is based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. The operas share principal characters and vocal techniques (including the relationship of the voice to instrumental settings). The singers are used interchangeably as soloists and members of a chorus. The immediacy of choral respons…
Perfect Lives
*2022 repress now in digipak, with new cover art* Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s." At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980s update of the mythology of small town America. Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians - "R", the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, "The World's Greatest…
Atalanta (Acts Of God) Volume II
2010 release. Three of the satellite songs from Robert Ashley's opera Atalanta (Acts of God) - each inspired or revolving around one of the main characters of the opera, Max, Willard and Bud. Atalanta (Acts of God) was written in the 1980s, begun while Ashley was still in production for the television opera, Perfect Lives.
The many hours of material were performed throughout the world in many
different configurations, but this is the first time these songs have
been available on CD. Personnel…
Atalanta (Acts of God)
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1985. Robert Ashley makes use of the story of Atalanta
- a royal princess, discarded by her family, who was raised by the
animals to become the fastest-running human, and who was later reclaimed
by her father to marry her off for dynastic purposes - to present the
character aspects of the "successful suitor". These three aspects of
character are presented in the opera as anecdotes about three
extraordinary men of our times: Max Ernst (surrealist paint…
Private Parts
**2020 repress **Lovely Music presents a reissue of Robert Ashley's Private Parts, originally issued in 1978. This newly mastered CD release is a must-have for aficionados as well as a perfect introductory work to Ashley's oeuvre. Among Lovely Music's first six releases, it came to be known as "the yellow record". No one had ever heard anything like it; Ashley presented an unvarnished exposition of the inner workings of a man's mind. And on the other side, those of a woman. These two episodes we…
And Company
** 2021 Stock ** The Alabama born saxophonist/clarinetist Marzette Watts had a short lived career as a member of the sixties avant-garde, but achieved legendary status for the company he kept in his Cooper Square loft where the likes of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders often congregated. This debut date is best known for the presence of players, who like Watts, were to become renowned for the rareness of their recorded output, including Sonny Sharrock,…
Live At Cafe Montmartre 1966 Volume Two
"Don Cherry, more than any other artist in the jazz of his era, pioneered the music's internationalist nature that has now come to be commonly accepted as an integral part of its character. The individuality of Cherry's contribution to the history of jazz has often been unfairly obscured by his admittedly important association with the music ofOrnette Coleman. While the (pocket) trumpeter's position as Coleman's front line partner in the altoist's first revolutionary quartet was indeed a major o…
Live at Café Monmartre 1966
First release of this 1966 recording from the ESP-Disk vaults; featuring: Don Cherry (trumpet); Gato Barbieri (tenor saxophone); Bo Stief (bass); Karl Berger (vibraphone); Aldo Romano (drums). Live performance from the legendary Café Montmartre in Copenhagen, Denmark, recorded in 1966. Digitally remastered. Also included: the ESP DVD-audio sampler, featuring selections of almost every ESP artist. Over 12 hours of music! Digitally remastered. "Don Cherry, more than any other artist in the jazz of…
Concert for the Comet Kohoutek
Recorded on December 22, 1973 in New York City at the famous Town Hall, this eclectic ESPDisk-sponsored celebration of the Comet Kohoutek featured a fire eater, talking drums, and dancers in platform shoes, in addition to Sun Ra's Arkestra. After taking the stage ninety minutes late, the band expertly navigates its way through cosmic free playing, big-band romps, and didactic vocal numbers. Compared to the original pressing, this re-issue is digitally remastered by Joe Phillips and includes brie…
Live at Café Monmartre 1966 Volume Three
Live At Café Montmartre Volume Three features more great music from the Don Cherry Quintet. Recorded in March 1966, Don Cherry joins forces with Gato Barbieri, Karl Berger, Bo Stief and Aldo Romano for two exciting, extended performances of "Complete Communion" and "Remembrance". A recording that will surely be known as classic, Volume Three is essential music for all fans of improvised music.
Black Beings
This version of Black Beings contains of 15 minutes of additional material thought to have been lost. When he started out on ESP-Disk', Frank Lowe was one of those hard-blowing tenor saxophonists we think of when we heard the phrase "free jazz." Born in Memphis, he moved to San Francisco and, while visiting New York, began playing with Alice Coltrane (on whose album World Galaxy he made his recording debut in 1971), Sun Ra, Rashied Ali, and Noah Howard, and eventually moved to the Big Apple. On …
The Forest and the Zoo
"In 1966, the late Steve Lacy visited the new ESP-DISK office at 156 Fifth Avenue with a master tape of his concert in Buenos Aires with his quartet... He offered to sell the master for what I thought was an exorbitant price. I bought it. ... In 1992, the master tape was brought to engineer Ken Robertson at the Sony Studio, who observed that it had been recorded out of phase, and he corrected the phasing." - Bernard Stollman
"Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy's impressive career was filled with man…
Contact High With The Godz
2025 stock Coming from the same Lower East Side scene that had already delivered the Fugs to ESP-Disk’, when the Godz went into the studio in 1966, there was no precedent for what they did. The first albums of the Velvet Underground and the Stooges lay in the future. The title Contact High with the Godz might suggest psychedelia, but even that freewheeling style, still yet to blossom, would come nowhere near the freedom and sheer avant-gardeness of the Godz' first LP. They were not afraid to sou…
Turn On, Turn In, Drop Out
This CD release of Dr. Leary's Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out is the first ever reissue of the ESP-Disk' vinyl edition originally released in 1966. This unadorned spoken word recording of the '60s icon, Timothy Leary ("the most dangerous man alive"), was recorded at the famous Millbrook, New York estate just before his famous residency was ended by repeated raids and arrests by G. Gordon Liddy. Though the album title, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, became a clichéd rallying cry for a whole generation, …