Ashley: Automatic Writing/Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon/She Was A Visitor

• Artist: Robert Ashley
• Rating:
• Release Date: 1996
• Total Time: 62:00
• Genre: Avant-Garde

Review

Automatic Writing and Other Works marks the re-release of three new musical landmarks: Automatic Writing (1979), in which the composer explores spontaneous speech unfiltered (as much as is possible) by his normal language behavior with "My Mind Is Censoring My Own Mind," a sensual and captivating study of random vocal reactions (sung by the vocal trio of Mary Ashley, Mary Lucier, and Barbara Lloyd) with a personal story (by Cynthia Liddell) about the sense of touch which, along with smell, is repressed in Western society, and "She Was a Visitor in "Extended Voices"" (1967) from the opera That Morning Thing, performed by the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus and conducted by Alvin Lucier -- this wonderful piece describes musically how rumor is spread, with leaders of a chorus group selecting phonemes of the chanted line "she was a visitor" and the group sustaining each individual sound. The amassed sound, a surface of normalized little disturbances, in which an audience could also participate, begins to resemble airplanes, cars, trains -- or perhaps the subatomic world. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Rovi

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