Lovely Music, Ltd.
Lovely Music (full name Lovely Music, Ltd.) is an American record label devoted to new American music. Based in New York City, the label was founded in 1978 by Mimi Johnson, an outgrowth of her nonprofit production company Performing Artservices, Inc. It is one of the most important and longest running labels focusing exclusively on new music and it is devoted to recording American experimental/avant-garde music.
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…
Musica Iconologos
A surprising release from the radical Fluxus composer, Yasunao Tone
- an encoded description of the visual image in utmost detail. In the
mythical future, somebody can translate the sounds of this compact disc
back into pictures. Personnel: Yasunao Tone and Craig Kendall - image selection and processing; Craig Kendall - computer programming, digital sound creation, manipulation; John D.S. Adams - assistant producer and audio consultant.
In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were...
**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…
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…
Celestial Excursions
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
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 …
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) …
Yellow Man With Heart With Wings
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…
Voice is the original instrument
Collection of Joan La Barbara early works and her first vocal compositions, originally released on LPs in the 1970s and early 1980s on her own Wizard Records. "One of my earliest pieces, "Hear What I Feel", was a self-exploratory, sensory-deprivation experimental work, designed to help me discover new sounds, delve into psychological aspects, as well as communicate with the audience on a pre-verbal level of awareness. After spending an hour in isolation with my eyes taped shut and not touching a…
Studio Retrospect
A collection of six compositions made in electronic music studios from 1959 to 1984. All were composed for concert hall or theater performance with choreography, as well as for distribution on recordings. Music from the Venezia Space Theatre, The Dresden Interleaf, and Echo-D were composed for quadraphonic theater systems, and were later spatially remodeled for release on stereophonic recordings. A collection of six compositions made in electronic music studios from 1959 to 1984. All were compos…
Jetsun Mila
Beautiful extended ambient work from Eliane Radigue, a composer known for her work with magnetic tape and Arp Synthesizer, and who studied under Pierre Schaeefer and Pierre Henry in the late 50's. Her compositions are often drone-like, impeccably crafted electronic sounds which seem to move in a continual flow around the listener. She has created many meditative works since the late 1970s, mostly based on Tibetan Buddhist subject matter.Jetsun Mila is inspired by the life of Milarepa, a great yo…
Songs of Milarepa
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1998. Double CD of all five of Elaine Radigue's songs in tribute to the Tibetan saint and poet from the 11th century. Two of the tracks dates from Radigue's first release in 1983, two are previously unreleased and the final 62-minute track was previously issued as a sole CD in 1987. The material is performed by Radigue (synthesizer and recording), Robert Ashley (English voice), and Lama Kunga Rinpoche (Tibetan voice). Radigue was born in France and has stud…
Neural synthesis n. 6-9
1995 release. Neural Synthesis Nos. 6-9 combines the art of music, the engineering of electronics, and the inspiration of biology. In it, David Tudor orchestrates electronic sound in ways analogous to our biological bodies' orchestration of consciousness. The performance originates from a neural-network synthesizer conceived and built especially for Tudor. He surrounds this synthesizer with his own unique collection of electronic devices, and in the recording on this CD made for headphone playba…
Three Works For Live Electronics
Originally released on Lovely Music as Pulsers / Untitled in 1984. This re-release includes an additional piece from David Tudor, Phonemes. Pulsers explores the world of rhythms created electronically by analog, rather than digital, circuitry. With analog circuitry, the time-base common to the rhythms can be varied in many different ways by a performer, and can eventually become unstable. Untitled is a part of a series of works composed in the 1970s that were developed through experiments in gen…
Leapday Night
A series of three pieces/suites; 'Leapday Night', 'A Traveler's Dream Journal', and 'Interspecies Smalltalk' involving Rhys Chatham/Ben Neill (on trumpet/mutantrumpet), Fluxus mainstay Takehisa Kosugi (violin), and David Behrman himself on electronics. Behrman creates thickly layered liquid sounds utilizing this complex computer music system which absorbs, actually hears, the sounds of instrumentalists, then plays off their improvisations with its own synthesized reactions. The system consists o…
On the Other Ocean
On the Other Ocean is an improvisation by Maggi Payne and Arthur Stidfole centered around six pitches which, when they are played, activate electronic pitch-sensing circuits connected to the "interrupt" line and input ports of a microcomputer, Kim-1. The microcomputer can sense the order and timing in which the six pitches are played and can react by sending harmony-changing messages to two handmade music synthesizers. The relationship between the two musicians and the computer is an interactive…
Still Lives
Three amazing works for pure waves and instruments. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers’ physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tuni…
Theme
Theme features three works from Alvin Lucier. Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings is a work in which the strings of a piano sound by themselves. Several EBows (small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars) which would cause the piano strings to vibrate and sound are placed on the strings of the piano. The pianist works from a prose score which describes the process and suggests she freely position and reposition five EBows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of v…
Crossings
1990 CD reissue of prime-era Lucier product, with works from 1982-85. Features 'In Memoriam Jon Higgins (for clarinet in A and slow-sweep pure wave oscillator)', 'Septet for Three Winds, Four Strings and Pure Wave Oscillator', and 'Crossings (for small orchestra with slow-sweep pure wave oscillator)'. Said slow-sweep pure wave oscillator produces slowly swept pure waves that oscillate (on separate occasions) a clarinet, three winds and four strings, and a small orchestra. Maximum beat frequency …
Still and moving lines of silence in families of hyperbolas
Double CD release of of a four-part work, initiated in 1972 and recorded as presented here in 1983-4 and 2001. This reissues two long-out-of-print LPs on Lovely, with four added parts (the strings) released for the first time. A series of mostly solo instrument works for the likes of: clarinet, marimba, viola, voice, xylophone, violin, flute, glockenspiel, cello, horn, vibraphone. Performed by: Thomas Ridenour, William Winant, Dan Panner, Rebecca Armstrong, Conrad Harris, Susan…