Search - Robert Ashley :: Yellow Man with Heart with Wings

Robert Ashley
Yellow Man with Heart with Wings
Genres: Dance & Electronic, Classical

Track Listings (2) - Disc #1
1. Spanish (26:51)
2. English (26:39)

CD Details

All Artists: Robert Ashley
Title: Yellow Man with Heart with Wings
Members Wishing: 1
Total Copies: 0
Label: Lovely Music
Original Release Date: 7/1/1990
Release Date: 7/1/1990
Genres: Dance & Electronic, Classical
Styles: Techno, Symphonies
Number of Discs: 1
SwapaCD Credits: 1
UPCs: 723721139322, 745295100324

Synopsis

Album Description

A two-part composition with narration (part one in Spanish and part two in heavily altered English) commissioned by public radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, this music has a plain, serene beauty. Part one is a narration by Guillermo Grenier in dreamy, flatly inflected Spanish, backed by a four-note synthesizer track, and punctuated by mysterious, heavily processed vocalizations. Ashley throws in extensive sound washes and other electronic figures which flutter in and out of the mix. The text, Ideas from The Church, will later show up in the 1994 opera, Foreign Experiences. It is included in the liner notes. In part two, the four-note synthesizer line returns, this time backing an ethereal, sustained chord, and the vocals sound like a distant rendering of the earth's electromagnetic halo.

CD Reviews

Hypno-soundscaping

DAC Crowell | 04/11/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Uh...yeah. Odd title, but that does kind of sum up what's up here. There's two versions of the same work on this disc, the first uses a Spanish 'narrator', speaking in a very Ashley-esque monotone, like some hypnosis tape. The second is in English, ostensibly, but the voice here has been massively processed via vocoding and other odd methods. For my money, the second version is the best...a long, slowly shifting soundscape of drones and whirring, overlaid with the eerie vocoded speech, and punctuated with occasional outbursts of speech, like some fragmented and ominous incantation. Weird out-of-tune harpsichord drifts in and out, like some shortwave broadcast, thru much of this. And under it, a weird, almost Kraftwerk-like bass pattern, also drifting in and out. This 24-minute track alone is worth the price of admission, I think. Plus it omits the hypnotic voice stylings that Ashley seems to prefer, which I find sort of creepy, and definitely something which can put one into some odd mental states over the long term."