Search - Dwight Ashley :: Four

Four
Dwight Ashley
Four
Genres: Dance & Electronic, New Age
 
  •  Track Listings (8) - Disc #1

Nearly a hundred years after the seminal works of such expressionist composers as Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives, Ashley has taken the ambient/electronic sound palette and produced a nakedly neo-expressionistic reinter...  more »

     
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CD Details

All Artists: Dwight Ashley
Title: Four
Members Wishing: 0
Total Copies: 0
Label: Orchard
Original Release Date: 1/1/2004
Re-Release Date: 12/21/2004
Genres: Dance & Electronic, New Age
Styles: Ambient, Electronica
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPC: 825346744322

Synopsis

Album Description
Nearly a hundred years after the seminal works of such expressionist composers as Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives, Ashley has taken the ambient/electronic sound palette and produced a nakedly neo-expressionistic reinterpretation of the genre that is at once exquisitely beautiful and profoundly disturbing. Beneath the deliciously gorgeous surface serenity of Ashley's compositions is an edgy discordance that suggests all is not well in this otherwise pretty world. A subtle intimation of malaise on Four's ethereal first track progresses into detachment, alienation, and finally psychosis in subsequent tracks, culminating in an arresting, hallucinatory dirge that sounds eerily like the soundtrack to an execution. If there were any question concerning Ashley's intent to provide the listener with a psychologically provocative experience, the cover art for Four - a colorless, mangled hand jutting forth from a bucolic backdrop, where distorted clouds intimate something about to go awry - leaves no doubt. True to expressionist principles, Ashley has crafted his music to seduce listeners into travelling through his psyche, and in turn, their own.

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CD Reviews

Ashley's best yet
T. Story | Ohio | 01/20/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)

"Hot on the heels of his acclaimed solo debut "Discrete Carbon", Dwight Ashley ups the ante pretty significantly with "Four". Lovely slabs of angular guitar harmonies fall in and out of dissonance, creating a wash of sound that is always shifting, somehow managing to comfort and alienate at the same time. Good stuff ."
Appropriately spatial
simpcity | 03/11/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)

"Four - Dwight Ashley's follow-up to Discrete Carbon - is a series of constructed musical spaces. One experiences them three dimensionally.



On the liner notes to Discreet Carbon. Dwight characterizes some of his music wryly as "inaudible" (which reminds me of Charles Ives' famous comment about the tenuous relationship of music with sound). Certainly, some of this stuff reminds me of Central Park in the Dark - sans the marching band and fireworks of course.



I am especially fond of track seven "the mighty fallen rust in the sun" which is just a beautiful ambient/industrial piece. To me it evokes the late-night sounds and emotions of an industrial floor polisher in a vast empty warehouse space. Now, some may object to the use of the term "industrial" in this context. But, Einsturzende Neubauten's Schaben is just this type of Industrial music, an exploration of sound and space in a mechanical context. I love it."