Robert Ashley's career is definitively marginal. Nothing dramatic happens in his music, and there aren't too many people who listen to it to begin with. The stories he tells are about Americans who don't cry out to have their stories told. Sometimes they're homeless or old. Sometimes they work at the bank. (They are, of course, heart-swellingly remarkable, but that's only because Ashley has a gift-- and a mission, maybe-- to make the uneventful feel mysterious and even transcendent.)
In 40 years, he's rarely raised his voice on record, and though the equipment he uses to compose the music behind his stories has changed, the actual music hasn't: It's pretty, quiet, and consistent. The people in his performances, which usually include him, don't even sing, they speak in rhythmic, exaggerated voices. Actual singing would be too dramatic. Last time he performed in New York, I was inappropriately excited-- it was like tailgating for meditation. My girlfriend fell asleep 20 minutes into it and later said, "I liked it."
In my fan's mind, I can't figure out why he isn't as famous-- or at least endlessly name-dropped-- as other dressed-down 20th-century composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich. One of the reasons might be that there's nothing conventionally sexy or cool about his music. Despite living in New York for more than half his life, Ashley's diction and style have always made him seem grandfatherly and safe, even when he's talking about life's vast gray areas.
The first paragraph of the liner notes for his new album, a companion disc to his large work Atalanta, reads, "Without the music (and even with the music) people drop out now and then." He knows people will fall asleep. This is Robert Ashley joking about Robert Ashley. Despite its beauty, there is nothing self-serious about his music; his sense of humor, though as quiet as everything else he does, probably blows away the expectations a typical Pitchfork reader has for 80-year-old Midwestern men or art-music composers, let alone both.
But this idea of hearing music piecemeal is also a thesis about how his music works, and an expression of how radically it has affected how I listen to it-- though even saying "I listen to it" feels too active. When I get an album of his I haven't heard, I don't sit down and make a trip out of it. I loop it and start doing chores. A few days later, I recognize something. Then, maybe, a piece of the story dawns on me.
Atalanta (Acts of God): Volume II is, again, part of a larger work whose whole pretense would take a long time to explain and actually turns me off a little, but the basic setup is Robert Ashley, Jacqueline Humbert (one of his long-time collaborators), and some synthesizers. It is two discs long, and for what it's worth, I think it's the best thing he's released in five years (and it's the sixth piece of relatively new Ashley music issued on CD this decade).
My least favorite section, "The Etchings", lasts for 30 minutes, but I don't skip it. "You, my dear, are the cutest little police officer I've ever seen. If you could take time from your route and step into that doorway with me for a while," Ashley says, before Humbert finishes his thought-- "We could transcend the limitations of the flesh." This is one way he writes: the vernacular against the abstract. The soda-counter philosopher.
Later, he tells an allegory about corporate America, but posits it as a story about tomato ketchup. This is another way he writes: a threatening current under something that seems harmless. The last, multi-part section involves Humbert talking about a series of au pairs. At one point, a mother comes home to an open door, with the sitter-- Simone, a hot, 19-year-old French-Swiss girl "who dressed in a decidedly New Wave direction, with gently pointed black ankle boots"-- drugged-up and post-coital. The next day the parent is filling the tub and trying to forget the still-unexplainable confusion, when the kid pushes his favorite stuffed animal into his crotch and says, "Monkey's gonna suck my penis!" I laughed out loud the first time I heard this, and the second. On the third, I felt worried: This is a story about the subtle nightmare of letting a stranger into your family, or of knowing your child has been exposed to something you weren't there for and can't counteract. A kid forcing his stuffed monkey to fellate him.
About three years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert Ashley for an interview. He gave me a small glass of potato vodka and told me a story about how the most beautiful building he had ever seen was across the street from where he lived. He still lives there, I think, off to the side.
