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Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$17 advance / $20 door / free or discounted for members
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The Lab presents live renditions and reimaginings of two works recorded by the Robert Ashley at the recently shuttered Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College while he was the director there in the 1970s. Known for his creation of the “Made-for-TV Opera” Perfect Lives, commissioned by The Kitchen and the BBC, Ashley left an enormous impact on composers and artists regarding performance practice, camp aesthetics in cinema, collaboration, electronic systems, and the role of language in contemporary American musical landscapes.
Automatic Writing, released in 1979 on Lovely Music, explores the composer’s fascination with involuntary speech. Recorded over a period of five years at the CCM, it is a kind of proto-ambient, proto-ASMR music all its own, brought to life at The Lab as a work of live performance by Brooklyn-based Object Collection. With a name borrowed from Surrealist writers André Breton and others — who sought to suppress the conscious intention of the artist — Ashley’s work opens to the idea of the studio as a private, domestic space, and uses his own involuntary speech as interior monologue.
Vidas Perfectas, a Spanish-language translation of Ashley’s most well-known work Perfect Lives, was originally staged for the first time by Alex Waterman at Issue Project Room, the Whitney Biennial, and Ballroom Marfa between 2011-2014. Oakland-based composer Alexandra Buschman-Román performs one episode, “La Patio de Atrás (The Backyard),” as a reimagining of the work for contemporary contexts. While Perfect Lives was originally produced in New York, Ashley recorded “The Backyard” initially at the CCM as a part of the LP Private Parts, released on Lovely Music.
About Automatic Writing
Originally released by Lovely Music in 1979, Automatic Writing is a monolith in the field of 20th century music.
Composed in recorded form over a period of five years, Automatic Writing is the result of Robert Ashley's fascination with involuntary speech. He has recorded and analyzed the repeated lines of his own mantra and extracted four musical characters. The result is quiet, mysterious melancholy and an early form of ambient music.
“I went towards the idea of sounds having a kind of magical function – of being able to actually conjure characters. It seemed to me that in a sort of psychophysical sense, sounds can actually make you see things, can give you images that are quite specific.” - Robert Ashley in The Wire (August, 2003)
Object Collection note on Automatic Writing
When we first thought of the idea of adapting Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing for a live staging, we didn't tell anybody about it for a year. The original recording is powerful magic and working with it was not to be done lightly.
Finally, in early 2011 we approached Bob about it. His immediate reaction was, "it can't be done." This wasn't surprising; we weren't sure if it could be done either. After about a minute of convincing and laying out our plan he suddenly and completely reversed his position to "let's do it!" We loved him for that.
Bob came to see our own work and was very supportive when many weren't. What this means to us is indescribable. He is gone now, but his radicality and openness will be felt for a long time to come. An astonishing artist and a good guy. This performance is, of course, dedicated to him.
— Kara Feely and Travis Just
Object Collection was founded in 2004 by writer/director Kara Feely and composer/musician Travis Just. The Brooklyn-based group operates within the intersecting practices of performance, music, and theater. With 16 evening-length performances alongside countless shorter works the company aims to upset habitual notions of time, pace, progression, andvirtuosity, and values accumulation above cohesion. Their work has touredto over 30 venues throughout North America and Europe and albums have been released on Slip Imprint/Warp, Infrequent Seams, and khalija.
Robert Ashley (1930-2014) is particularly known for his work in new forms of opera. In Ann Arbor in the 1960s, Ashley organized the ONCE Festival and directed the legendary ONCE Group, with whom he developed his first operas. Throughout the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and toured with the Sonic Arts Union. He produced and directed Music with Roots in the Aether, a 14-hour television opera/documentary about the work and ideas of seven American composers. His opera for television, Perfect Lives, is widely considered the precursor of “music-television.”