“Robert Ashley’s Private Parts has a plot, but you wouldn’t know it. The 1978 LP, which would later serve as the foundation for the composer’s seven-part televised opera Perfect Lives, discusses at length the inner workings of two characters, a man and a woman, anonymous to us and perhaps even to each other. Words flood its 40-plus minute runtime, circling meaning but never arriving at a conclusion. What’s explored by Ashley, in his drawling monologues, seems to be everything that isn’t happening—an inversion that slinks and dances among the shadows. We are privy to his subjects’ fidgety obsessions, tics of behavior, heady ruminations and psychic detritus, but narrative, insight, or meaning remain as elusive as a not-quite-remembered dream. Private Parts is built on emptiness. It is startling just how riveting that emptiness can be. ...”
2008 March: Robert Ashley, 2012 April: Sonic Arts Union, 2012 July: Various - Lovely Little Records, 2013 October: The Old Man Lives in Concrete, 2014 March: Robert Ashley, 1930-2014, 2016 March: Perfect Lives (1977-83), 2016 June: Music Word Fire and I Would Do It Again: The Lessons (1981), 2018 January: Sound Portraits Radio #15 Robert Ashley w/ Doron Sadja
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