Ataxia

Dwight Ashley | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 19, 2006)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Nepenthe Music & Publishing
• ASIN: B000J3Q1F6
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #905,352 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Impervious

2. When the Waters

3. Dark Swamp, Bright Sun

4. Circus of Sharp Toys

5. Dance of the Wobbler

6. As We Became Complacent

7. Our Dark Shallow Spoil

8. Holiday From Complexity

9. With Draw From the Many

10. Isle of Inevitability

11. Days Into Years

12. Ataxia

Editorial Reviews

Review

Much modern-day music makes a virtue of its flimsiness, of its disposability, happily bearing/baring its lightness, its play-status. Dwight Ashley's Ataxia does the opposite. Situating itself in polar opposition to frivolity and frippery, Ashley's heartfelt liner notes to this his third solo release contain ponderings as to whether it's feasible to sit through this sort of material without breaking something. Yes, Ataxia is that heavy, not just in the by now de rigueur dark and droney way that some ambient has about it; no, it's chewy and indigestible at times, and occasionally bordering on a relative of structured noise, but nevertheless still possessed of sufficient harmonic material not to frighten off the more adventurous of non-experimental listeners (though not, incidentally, extending to the vacuous becalmed shores of the "new age" that the Gracenote database would assign it as ill-fitting "genre" categorization). Ashley has in the past indicated the spirit of his musical style by the tag "neo-expressionism." For the uninitiated, this refers to an approach in which the artist handles the materials in a rough and raw way, typically expressing violent emotion, developing in the late 1970s as a reaction against the conceptual and minimalistic art of the 1970s. Ataxia's status as a work within the ambit covered by the above definition is indeed clear. Though it starts out with the relatively harmonious drift of "Impervious," Ataxia then wades into deeper murkier waters with "When The Waters Came," a thick and threatening undertow above which a bank of dissonant chords keeningly swells and eventually hangs, almost engulfing the listener. The watery sea-inclined metaphors are particularly apt here since the recording of part of Ataxia was attended by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. "Black Swamp, Bright Sun" is a decidedly uneasy calm after the storm-stentorian smears of a string-like synth treatment elaborate a meandering almost-melody that hovers between plangency and resignation. "Circus of Sharp Toys" hosts a background environmental hubbub before eventually presenting a melodramatic passage redolent of stern neo-Russian accompaniments to brutalist state solemnities. "Dance of the Wobbler" relents, offering soft and wibbling melodics, as if Ashley were allowing us a breath of air before launching us back into submariner mode on "As We Became Complacent," whose title hints at possible polemics underlying this work, its initial formlessness metastasizing into a form of dense industrial-orchestral drift. Darkish-hued ambient meets virtual-orchestral post-industriality is, then, the signature sound of this searching, sometimes harrowing, collection. Alan Lockett, e/i Magazine --e/i magazine

Product Description

Ataxia n: Inability to coordinate voluntary muscle movement; unsteady movements and staggering gait. The liner notes of Ataxia provide the preceding definition of the album's title - and by extension, a glimpse into composer Dwight Ashley's own experience of the exotic nether-world he creates through the course of these 12 remarkable tracks. Lack of coordination is conspicuously NOT an issue in Ataxia's carefully constructed compositions. Rather, Ashley skillfully weaves alluring post-industrial textures and atmospheres characteristic of his debut solo work, Discrete Carbon, into a gorgeous sonic dramatization of a time and place given over to uncertainty and unsteadiness on an epic scale. Ashley further stakes his claim in neo-expressionist territory with Ataxia's prescient interpretation of the current zeitgeist. While he avows in his liner notes that a number of tracks were post-Katrina expressions of his own feelings about the devastation of his "second city" of New Orleans, the entirety of Ataxia conveys the sense of surface well-being that slowly crumbles into a cataclysmic upheaval from which there is no return. Of his third solo release, Ashley states, "Ataxia is exactly the album I intended to make. Other albums I've done have had a way of taking on a life of their own, becoming something other than what I had originally intended - but Ataxia is as I envisioned it from the outset." If so, there is no doubt that Ashley's vision is one of horror and beauty, battling for supremacy - a battle whose victor is ours to decide.

See all Editorial Reviews