Dwight Ashley's path to a recording career has been a long and sometimes circuitous one - but his commitment to making the sounds he wants to hear has never changed.
A native of Northwest Ohio, Ashley was raised in a home constantly filled with music. His parents, while not themselves musicians, were devotees of opera and baroque composers - an influence that continues to shape Ashley's musical interests.
As a student of the cello in elementary school, Ashley began almost immediately to create his own compositions with a fellow orchestra student. Piano studies followed, along with choir and music theory under respected secondary-school instructor Louis F. Davis.
But despite this heavy involvement, music was little more than personal amusement for Ashley - until 1976, when he heard the Robert Fripp / Brian Eno recording, Evening Star, an experience which quite literally changed the course of his life. Inspired by the synthesis of classical form and rock instrumentation in Fripp and Eno's work, Ashley returned to composition in earnest. Within months, he had acquired a Freeman string ensemble, Fender Rhodes electric piano, an Arp Odyssy, a Mini Moog, along with assorted effects pedals and two TEAC 1/4" two-track tape units and a TEAC 4-track to record his earliest works.
In 1981, Ashley experienced a major setback in his recording career. Lightening from a freak thunderstorm struck his recording studio - a facility so new, it had yet to be insured. Virtually nothing was left after the fire that ensued, and it took Ashley the better part of the '80s to recover financially.
But this difficult decade ended with a new direction for Ashley, thanks to a chance reunion with high-school-era acquaintance Tim Story. While visiting a photographer in a neighboring studio, Story happened to hear a composition Ashley had recorded for his wife's noisy, fan-filled, warehouse-district office. Soon, the two were collaborating on compositions - which eventually led to the 1991 release of their first joint production, A Desperate Serenity, on Multimood Records.
Six years later, Ashley/Story released their critically acclaimed work, Drop, on the U.S.-based Lektronic Soundscapes label. Ashley's compositions (solo, and with Story) have since appeared on Lektronic's Soundscape Gallery Volume 3, and Multimood's (x) Apokalypsis Explicata.
Now, more than twenty years after the devastating loss of his first recording studio, Ashley has released his second solo recording project - Four - on his own label, Nepenthe Music. Two more solo projects are in the works, targeted for release on Nepenthe in late 2005 and late 2006, and a third Ashley/Story project is nearing completion, too be release summer 2005.
A different Arp Odyssy occupies a corner of his new recording facility (the Rectangle) -Â but while little else in the studio resembles his circa 1981 creative environs, Ashley's creative purpose is unchanged: "What I have written is music I wrote because I wanted to hear it. It was rather shocking to me to learn that others want to hear it, too."
Check out the artist's website:
http://www.dwightashley.comTrack List:
1. I Saw A Thousand Swallows
2. Machina Ex Deus
3. Stranded (No.2)
4. The Art of Standing
5. Holes Within Holes
6. I Swallowed A Thousand Saws
7. The Mighty Fallen Rust in the Sun
8. Best of Times
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