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.
Stop Vicious Cycles
**Original 1982 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Jill Kroesen with Peter Gordon, David Van Tieghem, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Bill Laswell, George Lewis, Arthur Russell, and others; produced by Peter Gordon
The subjects of Kroesen's songs range from the old Wayne Hayes sex scandal to Alexander the Great, to tunes of personal and political exploitation. On the first side she rocks, rolls, wails, and whines her way through songs with spunky, sometimes …
An Hour For Piano
**Original 1979 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** A trance music piece made up of repeating 4/4 cells in which an absolutely steady eighth-note motion predominates. Often several cells are going on simultaneously, and one cell frequently mutates into another through the addition or subtraction of a note or two. One has to step back far enough to get a perspective on the large-scale shifts in density and tonality before the impact of An Hour For P…
Fire & Ice
**Original 1982 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Intriguingly sets the apocalyptic Robert Frost poem, with trumpeter Yousef Yancy as the ice and Garrett List as the fire. Haunting settings of vital dada poet Blaise Cendrars' incandescent lines and Sweetness, an ineffably lovely poem by Bayard Lancaster, whose alto parallels soaring synthesizer parabolas, and the riveting voice of Genie Sherman, whose sinuous, sibilant messages are those of pure…
Western Classics
**Original 1982 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Ned Sublette, voice, guitar and piano; Jack Carr, harmony fiddle; Nelwyn Essary, rhythm mandolin; O.C. "Dink" Essary, melody fiddle; L.W. McGuffin, tenor ukelele; Bill Vance, lead mandolin; Lois Vance, rhythm guitar
Sublette's trip into the folk roots of country music. Post-modern cowboy music that simultaneously exults in and pokes fun at, and stretches the boundaries of genre conventions. The hi…
Qicksand (Book)
Quicksand was written to be an opera libretto. But it was written in the form of a novel. . . . I am devoted to "mystery" stories. I read them one after another, mostly two or three times. Some of the best writers today are writing in this form. So, I thought that I would try to make an opera libretto from a mystery story, told verbatim. That is, the libretto and the novel would be the same: no scenes moved around or actions adapted to the proportions of a libretto, just tell the story the way i…
Atalanta (Acts of God) (Book)
Rare 1st edition hard cover. The definitive text of Atalanta (Acts of God) is followed by an Afterword by Robert Ashley. An excerpt from the Afterword: "I had already decided who the three characters of Atalanta (Acts of God) would be: Max Ernst, a long-time artistic hero for me; Willard Reynolds, my uncle, a storyteller to whom I had listened for most of my life; and Bud Powell, a legendary jazz pianist. The "successful suitor" in the Atalanta myth now has three forms (reminding us of his succe…
Four Compositions
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
Sign Of The Times
Centered around the mesmerizing voice of Robert Ashley, presented here is early version (released on LP by Lovely Music in 1979) of "The Park" and "The Backyard", a masterpiece in its simplicity of form and in the purity and intensity of its effect on the listener. These two pieces were later to become the opening and closing segments of the seven part opera for television, Perfect Lives. Personnel: Robert Ashley - voice; "Blue" Gene Tyranny - keyboards; Kris - tablas.
Chris Mann And The Use
2001 release. Chris Mann, an Australian poet, writer, performer and composer relocated to New York City, brings a recording of his signature works to Lovely Music. With the participation of Christine Bard, Anthony Coleman, Christian Marclay, Jim Pugliese, Mark Stewart, and David Watson. Chris Mann's works for voice are based on complex texts, freely composed to allow a play of wit and humor. He explores the textures and gestures of Australian speech, with its rhythms and qualities of color, pitc…
eL/Aficionado
Robert Ashley's eL/Aficionado is 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 (chorus) challenge the Agent (soloist) in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to our fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives. The opera was performed many times between 1987 and 1993, and Lovely Music released a recording of the opera in 1994 (LCD …
Country Boy Country Dog
1994 release. A realization of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's How to Discover Music In the Sounds of Your Daily Life, a procedural score for recording and composing with environmental sounds. Eclectic, flowing music alternately gesturing toward impressionism and minimalism. Personnel: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - acoustic and electronic keyboards, field and studio recording, electronic transforms; Timothy Buckley - accordion in "The CBCD Intro"; the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music, featuring Robert Hughes …
Foreign Experiences
This new release from Lovely Music features Robert Ashley's famous ensemble, the "band" who interpreted his work for 20 years, from 1992 through 2012. They included Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Marghreta Cordero, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, and Amy X Neuburg. This recording was made at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin on May 12, 1995. The opera was also heard live at the Festival d'Avignon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musica Strasbourg, and Site Santa Fe. Foreign Experiences i…
Breaking the Surface
Two of Annea Lockwood's dramatic works dealing with issues of spiritual wholeness. Duende (1997), about shamanic transformation, is written with and performed by Thomas Buckner. Lockwood selected sounds which reminded her of certain vocal transformations heard in recordings of shamanic ceremonies. In such singing, changes in the voice mirror and also help to bring about changes in the singer's mind and awareness. Within an improvisational framework, Buckner explores the possibility of change of …
Two Lines
1995 release. Two legendary composer/performers, David Rosenboom and Anthony Braxton, join forces on Two Lines to unite composition with improvisation, "new music" with "new jazz". Starting from David Rosenboom's notated score for Two Lines and his musical computer program, these musicians have achieved, to paraphrase Rosenboom, created a composition that is immediately heard. Duets with interactive HMSL software. Includes Rosenboom's Two Lines, plus compositions in collaboration with Braxton: L…
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…
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…
Key
1995 release. Originally released in 1971. Key contains Meredith Monk's earliest compositions for voice. The songs that make up Key
were composed and performed in a three year period between 1967 and
1970, when Monk collected them into this 45-minute "invisible theater"
experience. Meredith Monk on the release: "In Key I wanted to
create a constantly shifting ambience. Each song dealt with a different
vocal character, landscape, technical concern or emotional quality. I
was trying for a vi…
Concrete
Concrete follows from Robert Ashley's preoccupation in two previous operas with the kind of speech that has not been explored in opera -- in Dust (LCD 1006CD), the speech of the homeless; in Celestial Excursions (LCD 1007CD), the speech of people living together in a home for old people. The three operas are not a "trilogy" in any sense, but they all come from this preoccupation with or fascination with special kinds of speech and special kinds of states of mind. "The characters I'm interested i…
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.
Violin Improvisations
Originally released in 1989 as Violin Solo. Sept. 3-4, '89. Takehisa Kosugi's improvisations, both with violin and miscellaneous sounding objects, have a sense of emerging from the bottom of a spiritual unconscious. From this place comes a music based more on the feeling of sounds than conscious arrangement. Memory, physical action, tactile perceptions, environmental conditions, and awareness of subconscious microcosmic and macrocosmic extremes inform his work as much as the intention to assembl…