Ataxia

Product Reviews:

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
http://www.ei-mag.com/verite0001.php#03

Categorization remains an imperative for some people, despite the fact that existing categories continue to decline in their ability to actually inform anyone of much of anything. What's needed is an adjustment in both attitude and expectations: way too much is made out of the adolescent need to figure out what to call it?

Still, the back cover of Dwight Ashley's Ataxia provides some earnest guidance, suggesting that the title should "File Under Electronic: experimental ambient; Classical: electronic / avant garde / minimalist music". Sadly, since Tower Records has recently declared itself finally and truly broke, the "Electronic: experimental ambient; Classical: electronic / avant garde / minimalist music" section may very well disappear from retail environments everywhere, forever.

But that shouldn't stop you from finding this recording. That Mr. Ashley's work largely refuses categorization is, of course, an aspect of its strength and its value to those actually interested in the way in which ideas that were initiated over the last few decades continue to filter into the present day, raising the bar for composers who remain engaged in music as a form capable of expressing much more than is now commonly asked of it.

Ataxia's principal accomplishment is in favoring form over formlessness. Across twelve pieces Ashley sensibly and meaningfully links a wealth of compositional forms that seamlessly embrace aspects of phonography, pure electronic and process techniques along with orchestral inflections -- in the case of "Circus of Sharp Toys", purely orchestral in instrumentation -- that readily recall but do not imitate Stockhausen, Ligeti, Bryars, Hovhaness and Kernis.

Most of Ataxia was written in New Orleans, just days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall and exposed FEMA as the Crony Reward Organization it is. And so the effect of what amounts to the U.S. federal government's waterboarding of an entire population leaves this music with a threatening and pelagic emotional charge. Ataxia traverses the stages within and between unstable surrounds which occasionally reach the terra firma of literal structure. The compositions ultimately favor an entropic path of unembellished dissolution and collapse. It's important to note the absence of any and every trace of sentimental melodrama. These pieces achieve an understated and implicit emotional charge that can only derive from authentic experience. Free of the cliché associative nonsense so heavily favored by practitioners of hyperbolic and romantic sonic mush, Ashley's allusions are evocative enough to extend beyond the specific and brush up against the universal. Ataxia accomplishes what will finally be categorized by anyone with open ears as that most illusive thing -- genuine, capital "M" Music.
— Kerry Leimer
sea of tranquility
http://www.seaoftranquility.org/reviews.php?op=showcontent&id=4388