Robert Ashley ‎- Private Parts (1978) FULL ALBUM

Lovely Music, Ltd. ‎– LML 1001 (US, 1978) 00:00 A. The Park 21:43 B. The Backyard Recorded at The Recording Studio, Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College (Oakland, California), July, 1977. Voice – Robert Ashley Piano, Polymoog, Clavinet – “Blue“ Gene Tyranny Tabla – Krishna Bhatt Centered around the mesmerizing voice of Robert Ashley, these two pieces are the initial versions of the first and last episodes (of seven) for Ashley’s first “new narrative“ opera-for-TV “Perfect Lives“. His narrative works have brought him international renown as a composer and as a writer. He has influenced a generation of composers and artists working with new forms of music for the media. A softly pedaling mood enhancer of exotically weird proportions, this suffers quite a bit from mis-appreciation in today’s harsh reality scenario. Ashley’s words hover just above your lips like a glowing lung, and it’s easy to understand why all of Kyle Gann’s friends in the 1970s were going around reciting phrases memorized from this album, as they emanate connectively to some false dream society like little else in the world of 1970s contemporary art. Not for everyone, I suppose, but the properly channeled will melt right into the couch. “Eventually he recognizes what he’s created as the first and last episodes of his opera for television, Perfect Lives, the middle opera of a monumental trilogy tracing the history of the movement of consciousness across America (east to west). This original recording with Ashley’s voice, accompanied by ’Blue’ Gene Tyranny on keyboards, and “Kris“ on tablas, remains a classic. It is a masterpiece in its simplicity of form and in the purity and intensity of its effect on the listener.. Everything in Ashley’s creation makes metabolic connections; there’s a transpersonal, time-exempt freedom in it; “the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air.“ In other words, the effect of his engaging, lyrical expression is that the mind opens. Only a masterpiece does that.