Earlier this year, the label Lovely Music, Ltd. reissued composer and avant-gardist Robert Ashley’s Private Parts on vinyl and compact disc. Getting a new pressing of that ’78 classic was a terrific turn of events, and on November 22 the same imprint is bringing out a fresh wax edition of Ashley’s ’79 album Automatic Writing. It provides a sharp contrast with the October arrival of a contemporary performance (from February of this year at NYC’s The Kitchen) on double CD of the composer’s 1991 opera in two acts Improvement (Don Leaves Linda). If wildly different, both sets illuminate complementary sides of the same wonderful mind, and they help to shape one of the best release programs of 2019.
Even from within an oeuvre known for its qualities of eclecticism (partly detailed in my long review of Private Parts in this space earlier this year), Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing is something of an outlier. While it postdates Ashley’s transition to text-based compositions, the record’s focus on involuntary speech, and specifically, Ashley’s self-described mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome, lends it stature that’s certainly distinctive but not especially divergent from the releases surrounding it in the man’s discography, in large part due to the focus on the human voice.
It required two attempts to record his involuntary speech, but Ashley succeeded, though the finished record offers more than this component. There are four intertwined parts, in fact: there is Ashley’s speech, a reading in French by Mimi Johnson of a translation of Ashley’s speech by Monsa Norberg, electronics and Polymoog as played by Ashley, and trad organ played by I’m unsure who (Paul DeMarinis designed and built the switching circuit that was crucial to the whole process). Actually, there is a fifth element, but we’ll get to that shortly.
Automatic Writing has been described as an ambient album, and as it’s a really quiet experience (best absorbed on headphones for maximum reward), that designation makes sense. It’s also, to my ear, the Ashley record that best fits the bill of minimal (although I haven’t heard everything he’s done). However, maybe the better categorization, if somewhat vague, is simply Experimental.
Experimental music can occasionally impact the consciousness as unfocused, but Automatic Writing doesn’t have this problem, as it is the byproduct of Ashley’s preoccupation with involuntary speech and the similarity of that impulse to the desire to make music (at a point in his life where he was depressed and out of work, as referenced in his notes for Automatic Writing’s 1996 CD reissue, which added the ’60s works “Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon” and “She Was a Visitor”).
Per the record’s title, one can extend the comparison of involuntary speech to artistic creation in general, and in plain fact Ashley combines the documentation of his verbal condition with an act of sheer creativity to produce a fascinating document, one that if comparable to ambient, minimalism, and sheer experimentation, is ultimately unlike any other.
There are additional points of interest. As said, Ashley was out of work at the time of Automatic Writing’s making, a circumstance directly related to the public’s disinterest in the type of music he was making. Obviously, this record was no commercial smash, though one wouldn’t necessarily glean that by gazing at William Farley’s sleeve illustration, which looks like it could belong to a Robert Palmer LP insinuating an island getaway at dusk rather than a plunge into the avant-garde by Robert Ashley.
That’s refreshing, especially when considering the fifth element in the composition’s equation, which is a bass thump-groove that rises into the mix, then subsides and returns, as bleeding through the walls of Ashley’s apartment. Automatic Writing was mixed at Mills College, but per a review by his colleague “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Ashley himself in conversation with Thomas Moore, the LP was recorded at home: the composer describes the sound as “people downstairs playing disco all day, all night.”
And so, commercialism encroaching from the outside, as Ashley states that he simply retained this aspect (in “tribute”) because the downstairs neighbors (individuals he’d never met) had become an integral part of the experience. As the record plays, his observation and the decision to keep the bass-bleed connect as right on the money (though I’m unsure how he would’ve removed it).
Automatic Writing can register, if not exactly like eavesdropping, then surely like being privy to something private (even more so than Private Parts). Private as opposed to performative; Ashley identifies music as a conscious, deliberate action, and performance as “doubly deliberate.” Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) offers the deliberate in abundant richness.
It also presents Ashley in full-on Post-Mod high operatic style in a work totaling nearly 90 minutes, first recorded in 1991 and released by the Nonesuch label. Lovely Music’s 2019 edition features a new cast save of Ashley himself, who serves as Narrator I via a recording made prior to his death in 2014 (he played the same role on the initial release, but this sounds like a different performance, though it could just be adjustments in the mix). Tom Hamilton assisted Ashley with the composition in ’91 and he returns here as Musical Director.
Ashley is the first voice heard but he quickly gives way to his ensemble of characters, though his presence is felt throughout as the flow of language magnificently unspools. My review of Private Parts assessed Ashley’s work as labyrinthine, and Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) definitely counts as such, though overall the effect is more purely literary as the text (the full libretto is available at www.robertashley.org) explores the character’s interiority (and especially the titular Linda as played by Gelsey Bell).
Opera is succinctly the combination of music and fiction, but with this work, Ashley, or more appropriately Ashley’s artistic descendants under the guiding hand of colleague Hamilton, don’t skimp on the music, as Act II’s “Tarzan” is a highlight of a performance that never sets a foot wrong. And for a guy who lamented his art’s lack of reception while alive, Ashley’s influence thrillingly perseveres in the here and now; just check out current NYC ensemble Object Collection for evidence (who curiously, will be staging an adaptation of Automatic Writing at The Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in May 2020).
A few concluding words on format: Automatic Writing’s LP-only status surely derives from the wide availability of the CD mentioned above. The original wax isn’t cheap secondhand, so this edition of a leftfield masterwork is welcome. Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)’s reissue on compact disc retains the work’s structural integrity, with one act unfurling uninterrupted on each disc. It’s not my preferred format (and likely not yours, either) but it does allow one to absorb the power and beauty of Robert Ashley’s work uncompromised.
Automatic Writing
A+
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)
A
