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.
A sound map of Hudson River
An aural journey from the source of the river, in the high peak area of the Adirondacks, downstream to the Lower Bay and the Atlantic Ocean; Annea Lockwood traces the course of the Hudson through on-site recordings of its flow at 15 separate locations. Annea Lockwood has recorded rivers in many countries to explore the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches. The listener will find that each stret…
The Intermediary
Digital remaster of this Lovely Music LP release from 1982. The Intermediary gathers all of 'Blue's' musical impulses together in one, sweeping work for prose, improvisation, electronics, and piano. A program records, processes, and plays back the changed sounds so that 'Blue' Gene must act as an 'intermediary': both the sender and receiver of information.
Just For The Record
Digital remaster of this Lovely Music LP from 1979. Just For The Record is a musical snapshot of West Coast post-classical music via Mills College: multiple-keyboard works by Robert Ashley, Phil Harmonic, Paul DeMarinis and John Bischoff.
A Sound Map of the Danube
Annea Lockwood has been recording rivers since 1970, "not to document them, but rather for the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches."' Lovely Music, Ltd. released Annea's seminal work A Sound Map of the Hudson River in 1989. Nineteen years later, we are proud to present A Sound Map of the Danube, her largest river recording project to date. Recorded over three years and five trips to Europe, A …
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…
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…
Mila's journey inspired by a dream
Performed (Arp synthesizer) and recorded by Eliane Radigue; Robert Ashley, English voice; Lama Kunga Rinpoche, Tibetan voice. Milarepa is a great saint and poet of Tibet who lived in the 11th Century. His autobiography, the Mila Kabum or Namthar, as told to his closest disciple, Rechungpa, has been translated into several Western languages. In this story of Milarepa's life, we can see how, through years dedicated to meditation and related practices in the solitude of the mountains, Milarepa achi…
Sound Paintings
Joan La Barbara begins Sound Paintings with a scream that pushes you into an unusual world of vocal sound. Her virtuoso singing style, developed over a 20-year period, can be heard on this disc, which combines some of her earlier works with more recent compositions. She takes her extended techniques, which include multiphonics, overtone singing, and glottal clicks, and orchestrates them in layered soundscape compositions using from 8 to 16 tracks of material.
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…
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…