Reissues
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…
String Quartet
"'String Quartet Describing The Motions of Large Real Bodies' was composed as the potential orchestra for a Robert Ashley 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 devices as yet undreamed of. The piece consists of an electronic orchestra of 42 sound producing modules. T…
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…
Natural Selection
Tip! 2000 release After Paradigm Discs released the 1976 LP by Anal Magic and Rev. Dwight Frizzell, the true scope and diversity of this man's activities became more apparent. First, there were the countless unused remnants from the original LP recording sessions, then the many films and their soundtracks, the regular radio shows, the dreamlanddiaries web page, the large scale Intermedia events, performing weddings and leading the live group Black Crack Review. For 25 years there has been a dyna…
Four Full Flutes
Here is the complete CD catalog of this superior NYC composers collective label (aka Experimental Intermedia); although pretty low-profile, there are some amazing releases on this label in the spirit of long, droned tones and advanced new music composition. Don't let the title to this Niblock thing throw you off -- this is massive trance music and a key work in the unspecified field of "pure sound". "...adjacent tones beat violently against one another while clouds of harmonics hover above the w…
40 years and one
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 …
Day for night
This CD represents a 25-year collaboration between renowned British avant-garde improviser Peter Cusack and instrument builder and sculptor Max Eastley. Cusack and Eastley have made these short episodes together between busy careers recording experimental music alongside artists such as Nicolas Collins, Steve Beresford, and David Toop). With numerous releases on ReR and Incus, the two musicians are mainstays of the British improvised music world, and Eastley is particularly prominent for his wor…
No mo
"In the summer of 1966 I worked in the classical Electronic Music Studio at the University of Toronto for six weeks. The system I used to create No Mo and Something Else consisted of Layfette tone generators, noise source and tape delay. In the Fall of 1966 I was the newly appointed director of the Mills Tape Music Center formerly the San Francisco Tape Music Center and now the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. Bog Road was created at the Mills Tape Music Center in the Summer of 19…
Electronic Works
One of our favourite "pure drone" album consisting of 3 amazing long tracks by Pauline Oliveros. I of IV was made in July 1966 at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio and was first released by CBS alongside works by 2 other young composers - 'Come out' by Steve Reich and 'Night music' by Richard Maxfield. It is really only in recent years (born out of the more radical elements of dance music, Electronica and ambient music) that music like this is being rediscovered by a growing numb…
Ghostdance
The long awaited soundtrack of the Ghostdance music and dance collaboration between Oliveros and Paula Josa-Jones, commissioned by Lincoln Center Out-of -Doors. "The Gkostdance collaboration with choreographer Paula Josa Jones began in Monterrey Mexico supported in turn by two month US/Mexico Exchange Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and FONCA. Together with our host—composer/ ethnomusicologist Arturo Salinas—we attended El Dia de los muertos in Chalco to help inform our work…
And The Mexican Jumping Beans
Back from a journey to Mexico Paul Panhuysen brought mexican jumping beans which are sold there as toys on the local markets. When in Eindhoven he began to experiment with these beans in different settings. As a result a cd with different recordings was published which used piezo discs as contact microfones, while beans are activated by lamps. The beans were jumping in eight containers made of various materials like plastic, aluminium or wood among others.
The Edison Effect: A Listener's Companion
A sound recording never preserves quite what it claims to preserve. Aspects are missing and alien elements introduced. On this CD there are many voices (from old records & wax cylinders), but always the surrounding noises draw the attention. Paul DeMarinis is a sound engineer who collaborated with several avantgarde composers, and then became an avantgarde composer himself. His compositions for speech, processed and synthesized by computers, such as Beneath the Numbered Sky, are collected on Mu…
Yomillak - Korean classical music
Selection of Korean classical music, performed by the Orchestra National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts. Cast your mind back to the 15th century. That is, of course, difficult if not impossible to do, but the major piece recorded on these CDs, Yomillak, 'Giving the People Joy', provides something of a sonic reference point: it was first performed in 1447. Y'millak is the most extended piece of orchestral court music surviving in Korea, and it has for many centuries been used for r…
Pure Gaze
“Block is an electro-acoustic and modern instrumental composer whose recorded compositions combine layered, processed wind and string instruments with processed sounds from sections of field recordings she has collected from various natural landscapes. Her performances include minimalistic scored musical sections played live by a quintet accompanied by taped material , often sounds of field recordings, or the same quintet previously recorded and electronically manipulated. block herself “…
Shipwreck Radio Volume Two
Volume 2. Eight enigmatic episodes from Utvær. A double CD in a full-colour 6-panel digipak. Between June & July 2004, as guests of Kunst I Nordland, Nurse With Wound broadcast twenty four unexpected radio transmissions from the Arctic Lofoten Islands. Seven of these transmissions are included on this double CD, packaged in a six-panel digipak. Bringing no instruments, they were left in the tiny fishing village of Svolvær with minimal equipment, and told to get out and make whatever they wanted,…
Paura
N.A.D.M.A. was officially born between August and the beginning of September 1972 during time spent in a little village in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. The identity and musical orientation of the collective centered on the convergence of heterogeneous interests and sensibilities coming from avant-garde jazz experiences liberated by post-free currents, from classical studies, or from musicians also active as visual artists who had cultivated an instrumental practice utilizing spontaneous …