Photo shows Morton Subotnick (photo: Martin Longley)

 

Robert Ashley at The Annex Theater, La MaMa

Decades ago, Robert Ashley's compulsively mundane opera-for-television Perfect Lives was serialised by Channel 4, in the formative days when it was a late-nite refuge for experimental broadcasting. This was the ideal platform to act as an introduction to the New York composer's oddball derailing of the so-called opera form. Now, at the La MaMa theatre for experimental performance in the East Village, Ashley is presenting three relatively recent operas, though it's completely clear that he chooses to employ this term merely because he has trouble connecting with any other ways of describing his dramatic-narrative intentions. In musical approach, Ashley has more in common with 1950s popular music, crafting a kind of burbling ambient doo wop, without the vocal harmonies. Apparently, this repertory run involves radically altered manifestations of the original works. Ashley directs, in cahoots with stage designer David Moodey.

First up is Dust, from 1998. A varied bunch of five homeless folks are arrayed on detritus-strewn park benches, with Ashley himself at the highest central point. He's flanked by Thomas Buckner, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, and his son Sam Ashley, all of whom have long inhabited the territory of avant-vocalising, in their different ways. Robert Ashley opens with a mumbled monologue, whilst his swirling music twitters and spumes in on the tide. Is he intentionally obscuring much of the verbal content? Is he muttering, old fogey style? Is the sound mix failing? Ultimately, this text-mesh feels fairly intentional, as the whole thrust of Ashley's work is to intone a parade of verbal snatches, life-experiences caught up in an overlapping electro-churn. As each character moves gradually into focus, the remaining four will continue chant-singing a repetitive 'chorus', a highly effective technique that, we suppose, does justify the invocation of the 'opera' nomenclature. The voices of the women cut through with particular resonance. They're both operating on a perverse off-off-off-off-off Broadway level, certainly avoiding any feared-for operatic-hysterics, but instead couching their lines in a music theatre mode, half intoning, with just a hint of actual singing, melodically rising and falling at key phonetic points. Ashley collects tales that are at once casually realistic and profoundly poetic, where the mundane, or the sexually extreme, or the absurd, or the starkly tragic, all take on a magical effervescence, assisted by the eternal rotations of the musical backwash. Hidden somewhere or other is Texan keyboardist 'Blue' Gene Tyranny, another longtime collaborator, and an important contributor to Ashley's trademark sound. Humour and horror can indeed be bedfellows here, in such a beguiling performance as this.

Can the next two pieces possibly float higher than Dust? Well, not quite. The triumph of Dust lies in its perfect balance between the abstract gaseousness of dialogue and music, whereas the season's two later works tilt the emphasis more towards wordiness. The same performers return for 2003's Celestial Excursions, although this time they're seated at identically functional tables, which are populated only by their paper-sheaves, a glass of water and a dried bean-pod each, the latter briefly shaken during the course of the piece. The narrations ostensibly concern the elderly occupants of a rest home, although this isn't necessarily apparent when they're weaving their stories. Somehow, the anecdotes don't possess the resonance or complexity of those in Dust, and the audience attention has a tendency to wander, with much fidgeting in evidence. The third act's interludes by dancer/performance artist Joan Jonas are uninspired and clichéd, arriving at a bad time for the restless posterior.

2007's Made Out Of Concrete (the title refers to its updating from the original Concrete production) makes a significant improvement, very nearly attaining the level of Dust. The characters are seated along what seems like one long and snaking gambling table, their tales spread out on what look like playing cards. This time, Ashley has a separate chair, in a rear corner. Now, the stories are back in the compelling regions introduced by Dust, with each performer receiving a true spotlight sequence by standing up and delivering their monologues directly and personally to the audience. In the case of Sam Ashley's climactic tale of the spirit world, "A Day On Planet Gilbert", this has a particularly sharpened effect, part prickly chill, part japing mischief. The evolution seems to be moving further towards naked theatre, with less music enacted ('Blue' Gene Tyranny is absent) and some sections delivered against a background of silence.

Ashley's universe is totally removed from agreed reality, his sage view gradually encroaching over these three works, an effect that's particularly pronounced due to his use of an ensemble that has the longevity of an extended family. All are working towards an Ashley vision, via the fragmented personalities of trawled anecdotal scraps. Ashley's unreality is synthesised out of a collected, communal set of true-life circumstances.

Fireworks Ensemble at (le) Poisson Rouge

The Fireworks Ensemble have been together for seven years, and are dedicated to the sprightly side of the modernist classical repertoire. Indeed, what could be more lively than their programme of kartoon klassics by the animated world's holy trinity of composers: Carl Stalling, Scott Bradley and Raymond Scott (even though the latter never deliberately wrote for such shorts, and rarely acknowledged the pervasiveness of his pieces, serially appropriated in the field, once they became available as 'library' music)? The palette is mostly conventional, and authentic to the period, with strings, percussion, saxophone and flute. The presence of Oren Fader's electric guitar is a surprise updating, jarring slightly, but still in keeping with the music's speedily capering feel. It just sounds a touch out of kilter with toons that spring mainly from around sixty or seventy years back. Despite displaying a somewhat academic image, the players can't help but loosen up once they begin their soundtracking, beginning with The Village Smittty, Ub Iwerk's 1931 Flip The Frog escapade, and continuing with 1941's Dance Of The Weed, directed by Rudolf Ising. In-between, the Fireworks crew play tunes by Raymond Scott, without the visuals (numbers that you'll certainly know: Powerhouse and The Penguin amongst them). The following toons featuring Tom & Jerry (1944's Puttin' On The Dog) and Road Runner (1956's There They Go-Go-Go!) are so imprinted on the collective consciousness that they're imbued with an absurdist majesty, as every musical sound effect hurtles along the lunatic action, Bradley and Stalling recreated with gusto. It's thrilling to watch the cartoons with the music, but there was also a strong urge to hear the pieces shorn of their visuals, thereby taking on a completely different meaning. An aural opportunity partially lost, but the visual temptations of Spike and Wile E Coyote are irresistible. Soon, the Fireworks Ensemble are laying down an album of these pieces, so such purist listening can be conducted from the armchair.

Larry Austin/Annea Lockwood at Roulette

Two composers share the bill of another Interpretations evening at Roulette. New Zealander Annea Lockwood's "In Our Name" is hung around two poems (of many) penned by Guantanamo Bay detainees, intoned by Thomas Buckner (him again) in a quite startling manner. At first, he appears to be the victim of some recent facial trauma, then it becomes evident that Buckner has a piece of electrical equipment held in his mouth, transmitting or picking up stray sounds which are governed by Buckner's cavity-shaping exercises. He's a scary bulging-cheeked presence: rapt, commanding and still. The 78-year-old Larry Austin's "Tableaux: Convolutions On A Theme" has alto saxophonist Stephen Duke performing in front of images largely comprised of cloudscapes, whilst the Oklahoma composer's octophonic computer sounds surround the audience habitat. The required parts demand stamina and fortitude, balancing between new music precision and jazz release. Duke ends up somewhat drained by the end, but his efforts are certainly worthwhile. The final piece provides yet another vocabulary, as pianist Joseph Kubera delivers Austin's "Redux Two", once again in tandem with an octophonic rumination on his notes.

Roger Kleier at Roulette

We can call the Californian guitarist Roger Kleier by three names: classicist, jazzicist and rocker. Tonite, his El Pocho Loco combo comes very markedly from the jazz scene, with Trevor Dunn on bass, and Ches Smith at the drums. The less immediately box-able Annie Gosfield plays the keyboards. Now living in NYC, Kleier appears to have a nostalgic yearning for the West Coast, with several pieces linked to evocations of those old days and old tales. There's a kind of rugged stiffness to the guitarist's riffing and soloing that marks him as an old blues rocker. That sort of rigidity is also found within the environs of new music ensembles who'd like to fuzz-rock, but don't quite pull off the necessary mangling wildness. His axe-ing doesn't have the nimble syncopation of a player steeped in the jazz improv juices, but Dunn and Smith take care of all the suspended abstraction. Even so, Kleier's group proceeds to deal out an engaging set of pieces that manage to turn their genrelessness into an asset. It's the fact that his compositions aren't pugilistically rooted in any expectedly compartmentalised vocabulary that makes them stand separately.

Morton Subotnick at Roulette

Computer music pioneer Morton Subotnick has been restoring, digitally polishing or even re-recording some of his old sample-sources, which may or may not account for the of-the-now nature of this performance. Close the peepers and instead of an avuncular middle-seventies gent, this could be some youthful laptop-stretcher emerging from the avant-dance scene. Almost. This gig is part performance, part reminiscence and part demonstration. The Californian Subotnick relaxedly chats with the audience about his days in the New York of the late 1960s, and the construction of his classic synthesised piece Silver Apples Of The Moon, which he proceeds to perform, complete with its shiny digital upgrade and speaker-hopping tone-transgressions. It's aggressively extreme, and must have sounded cripplingly alien back in 1967. The demonstration section of the evening involves Subotnick's software for teaching music to children, offering the fingers-on potential enjoyed during some of his own compositional strategies. It's informative, but we would rather have had either more music, or a longer concert spanning both aspects.