In Chatham

After the usual free breakfast , and a nice shower with a zesty tangy shower gel recently purchased on one of my covert shops, i headed off to Chatham to do a couple of mystery shops.One being a travel agent and the other a coffee shop. Both are now done and reports completed.

On the way i did stop in Gillingham to buy a few CD jewel cases. I use these to replace broken or very scratched ones.This is why ,in general, i prefer digipaks or cardboard sleeve packing for CD's.

The weather has been really sunny and hot again - around 26 degrees in the gardens of the Quays. I spent an hour and a half sunbathing this morning before catching the train to Chatham.

Speak later.

Thursday Music Selection - Another Mixed Bag

Another very eclectic mix -

Patrick Hawes - Quanta Qualia

The beautiful music from Patrick Hawes "Blue in Blue" CD which i found in Gillingham today for fifty pence.

( More Music Here )

Enjoy.

Robert Ashley

Another Wire magazine favourite is Robert Ashley - over the years quite a few of his ouvre has been reviewed in the magazine.

Robert Ashley - Automatic Writing (1979)

Here is that video i use to have =

Robert Ashley - Music With In The Roots Of The Aether

Robert Ashley - Flying Saucer Dialogue (1985)

Voices: Robert Ashley and Jacqueline Humbert
Keyboards: Robert Ashley and Paul Shorr Sound design and mixing: Paul Shorr Original sound materials from an anecdote for videotape directed by Lawrence Brickman
Thanks for musical collaboration to Jacqueline Humbert, Paul Shorr, and "Blue" Gene Tyranny
Produced by Robert Ashley, Lawrence Brickman, Performing Artservices, Inc., and Paul Shorr
Publisher: Visibility Music Publishers (BMI)

Robert Ashley is known as a pioneer in the development of large-scale, collaborative performance works and new forms of opera such as That Morning Thing and In Memoriam... Kit Carson. Landmark recordings, such as She was a Visitor and In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women, have pointed the way to new uses of language in a musical setting. His current works, operas for television entitled Perfect Lives, Atalanta (Acts of God), and Now Eleanor's Idea, are continuations of his long-time interest in and use of visual media to express musical ideas.

Ashley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1930. He studied and worked at the Speech Research Laboratories at the University of Michigan, and was a Research Assistant in Acoustics at the Architectural Research Laboratory. He studied composition with Ross Lee Finney, Leslie Bassett, Roberto Gerhard and Wallingford Riegger. During the 1960s, he was co-organizer of the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor which, from 1961 to 1969, presented many of the decade's major artists. He organized and directed the legendary ONCE Group, a music-theater collaborative that toured from 1965 to 1969. From 1966 to 1976. he toured with the Sonic Arts Union, the composers' collective that included David Behrman, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma. During 1975 and 1976 he produced and directed his fisrt television opera Music with Roots in the Aether (Video Portraits of Composers and their Music), which documented the work and ideas of seven major American composers. From 1969 to 1981, Ashley was Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills.

Atalanta (Acts of God) is a comic opera in ten scenes with multi-projector slide show. Its "subject" is the character of three men who "stood apart" from their society by virtue of their genius: Max Ernst (surrealist painter), Willard Reynolds (shaman-storyteller) and Bud Powell (pianist-composer). The music and texts were composed in the form of anecdotes or "moral fables" composed and performed in the spirit of "divine inspiration" or heedlessness. It is Ashley's intention to invoke the characters of the opera through this method. Atalanta (Acts of God), whose theme is architecture, is the first part of a trilogy of narrative works ("operas"), of which Perfect Lives, whose theme is agriculture, is the second part, and Now Eleanor's Idea, whose theme is geneaolgy, is part three.

"Flying Saucer has come to Earth for important indicator event concerning humans: The Marriage of Atalanta. Problem: Apples. ('Apples, even golden ones, for one of the greatest living humans?') Log: 'Pick up the apples, in whatever form, and take them to Earth-base for analysis. You will know them. This has been arranged. After analysis they are to be returned to where you got them. No evidence that they were gone. What we need to know is what they are and what is their attraction for this great human.' Flying Saucer briefed on 'current' human concerns, specifically, architecture: shelters, power generators; monuments (functional, creative, symbolic space; i.e., images of vision, narrative and sound). Simple Flying Saucer Mission. What could be easier?

Flying Saucer misses the mark by thousands of years. Arrives mid-twentieth century. Picks up three, charming men. Earth base now a small-town bank in Illinois. Put them in the bank for a moment, where they will be seen, take them back to where they came from. All this in zero-time. Situation getting worse. Morale is 'falling.' Flying Saucer personnel in advanced stages of enchantment, picking up bad habits, two hours in the bathroom in the morning, all-night parties, drinking, drugs, always humming songs ('working on the changes, sir'), god knows what next. Personnel is not immune to imagination. Affects them like a virus. Next thing you know, some will want to stay ('you know, sir, I'm really getting to like it here'). Some apples." (Robert Ashley)