Step into the creative home base of one of the visionary architects of the Los Angeles beat scene. Last week, the William Grant Stills Arts Center opened its […]
Cathode Cinema presents Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives @ 2220 Arts + Archives

Watch the Lovely Music composer’s classic TV opera on February 11th at 2220 Arts + Archives.
Here’s another great thing going down at the new 2220 Arts + Archives cultural center and performance space in the Historic Filipinotown neighborhood… February 11, Cathode Cinema presents a Friday night screening of Robert Ashley’s classic TV opera, Perfect Lives!
A giant of the American avant-garde, Robert Ashley co-founded the ONCE Group, an Ann Arbor collective that helped organize early performances of Meredith Monk, Eric Dolphy, and Pauline Oliveros. In the 1970s, he served as the director for the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, which has a long list of avant-alumni including some names you might know — Terry Riley, Joanna Brouk and Steve Reich. His opera Perfect Lives has been called “the most influential music / theater/ literary work of the 1980s.”
From 2220 Arts + Archives: “Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians — “R”, the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, “The World’s Greatest Piano Player”. They have come to a small town in the Midwest to entertain at the Perfect Lives Lounge. As Robert Ashley describes in the opera synopsis, ‘they fall in with two locals to commit the perfect crime, a metaphor for something philosophical: in this case, to remove a sizable about of money from The Bank for one day (and one day only) and let the whole world know that it was missing.'”
Tickets are available now via Dice FM: https://link.dice.fm/c2e9f875b534?pid=1426c053
Revisit our feature on Lovely Music Ltd: https://insheepsclothinghifi.com/lovely-music-ltd/