Music from United States

This album comes from the love for Music. Contemporary music, but also Songs. From the love for History and People. From the observation of a stage before and after a concert. And from Friendship and Collaboration.Erik Satie and John Cage were two musicians of great influence and supreme coherence. In their rigorous path they choose the road to astonishment. On the road to their artistic ideal they met the “music”, when others only loosely saw it. Satie and Cage are, now historically, two compos…

**Deluxe slip-cased version features a 110-page book** Definitive CD reissue of this original Cramps label album from 1974, an early classic from Robert Ashley with music provided by Paul DeMarinis. This deluxe slip-cased version features a 110-page book, reproducing the original John Barton Wolgamot text along with fascinating liner notes explaining the whole project from Keith Waldrop and Robert Ashley. The CD features one long composition with Ashley reading a text by poet John Barton Wolgamo…

Double LP reprint of the compact disc by Robert Ashley titled String Quartet Describing the Motions of Large Real Bodies / How can I Tell the Difference? (I & II). 'String Quartet' was composed as the potential orchestra for an opera based on the text of 'In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women'. When the work was composed, in 1972, it was clear that a huge change in electronic instrumentation was just beginning, a change that would involve computers and sound producing d…

For the performance of "the wolfman" recorded here, produced at the university of california at davis, Robert Ashley used an earlier (1960) tape composition entitled "the 4th of july". that composition changes gradually from a parabolic-microphone documentation of a backyard party into a layering of tape loops and tape-head feedback.Long deleted original lp edition of 290 copies only with detail photo from the performance and full score.

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…

Foreign Experiences was commissioned by Performing Artservices, Inc. (1993) with funds from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust. The opera was premiered by the Robert Ashley Ensemble at the Festival d'Avignon in 1994. This realization is a duet version by Sam Ashley and Jacqueline Humbert. The pre-recorded voices of the Ashley ensemble are the background chorus. 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, diff…

2005 release. Following the ground-breaking work, Dust (LCD 1006CD), godfather of experimental opera Robert Ashley returns with Celestial Excursions. Ashley's endeavor explores remarkably uncharted territory -- the kind of language that is common among "old" people who talk all the time or not at all, to anyone passing by or to themselves. The opera premiered at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, before coming to The Kitchen for its U.S. premiere in April 2003. Celestial Excursions delves into the wi…

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 …

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) …

1994 release. The fourth opera in Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy: Junior, Jr.'s story. A group of scenes from the life of an agent. The scenes are a kind of debriefing to a jury of interrogators, in which the Interrogators challenge the agent in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to American society's ongoing fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives. Featuring Thomas Buckner as the agent and Jacqueline H…

1990 CD issue of Robert Ashley's 1978 piece for voice and electronics. A two-part composition with narration (part one in Spanish and part two in heavily altered English) commissioned by public radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, this music has a plain, serene beauty. Part one is a narration by Guillermo Grenier in dreamy, flatly inflected Spanish, backed by a four-note synthesizer track, and punctuated by mysterious, heavily processed vocalizations. Ashley throws in extensive sound washes and ot…

Important reissue of two historic minimalist albums, originally released on LP via the Advance label and out of print for decades now. Mastered from original tapes according to the composers original specifications. Packaged with informative liner notes by Kyle Gann, including an overview discography for seminal works within the field of minimalism. This timely CD reissue combines two LPs from the Advance label-Richard Maxfield’s Electronic Music and Harold Budd’s The Oak of the Golden Dreams-bo…

Cocaine Death is a compilation of three of Prurient's finest Hospital cassette releases as well as two unreleased tracks. The previously released material forms a triptych exploring the relationship between futile pleasure, substance and escape; escape being a myth. Cocaine Death (originally C-10 packaged in an envelope, limited to 46 copies) is perhaps the most sought after of the recent Prurient cassettes. The content is based on the glamour and destruction of toxic nightlife. The B-side featu…

Trio Omphalos (Stefan Hülsermann, clarinet; Olaf Pyras, percussion; Ji-Youn Song, piano) plays its own arrangements of John Cage's Chess Pieces and Four Dances and of thirteen of Tom Johnson's Rational Melodies, plus Johnson's Counting Duets No. II.

Organist Dominik Susteck plays John Cage's Organ²/ASLSP and Toshio Hosokawa's Cloudscape and Sen IV, with three of his own improvisations using mobile MIDI instruments by Gerhard Kern, at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne. Deutschlandfunk, 2015.

 This man and his work represent the real "speculum musicae" of the past 40 years. The example of his music embodies a lifelong commitment to an integral radicalism. . . . this is a venerable tradition that Philip has written so eloquently about, and continued in his music. A tradition that stems from "Charlie" Ives through John Cage and Lou Harrison. All of these composers would ultimately admonish us to do one thing: to open our ears--and LISTEN! —Peter GarlandPerhaps the single most striking …

Philip Corner was an active member of Fluxus, a founder of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble, the resident musician and composer for the Judson Dance Theatre, and co-founder of Gamelan Son of Lion. The musical opportunities that these ensembles and their performances offered Corner ensured that he was both prolific and had or developed a deep understanding of the important artistic influences of that time. Corner uses a variety of scoring methods. He is truly the equal of John Cage in forcing us t…

Experimenting With Household Chemicals' is a 1995 album by the laregly elusive post-minimalist Downtown experimenter Peter Zummo. Whilst possibly best known for his work on classic Arthur Russell recordings, he's been a mainstay of New York's vaunted experimental scene since the the mid-late '70s, but only released three solo albums proper. This is his 2nd, exploring "a trombone-specific method for generating melodic movement, as well as a collection of related, "spinoff" melodic material for en…

Peter Zummo (born 1948) is an American composer and musician. He plays the trombone, valve trombone, euphonium, synthesizer, other electronic instruments, and also sings. He is associated with the post-minimalist and Downtown aesthetics, and he describes his music as "minimalism plus a whole lot more." "I first discovered Peter Zummo when I first discovered Arthur Russell. I kept hearing THAT trombone sound throughout Arthur's music and through scanning through various label credits made the con…

Piano music by Henry Cowell and John Cage (1912-1948), including The Banshee, Aeolian Harp, The Perilous Night and Dream, played by Sabine Liebner; recorded at Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich, December 2014.