Released to coincide with his birthday, and organised by Dan Wriggins (of Friendship) in collaboration with Dear Life Records, You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac is a covers compilation featuring versions of Owen’s songs from family, friends, labelmates and fans. A celebration which recognises a birthday but also so much more than that. A body of work and the burgeoning legacy it has and continues to establish, not to mention the blossoming community fostered through Owen’s label Orindal Records.

And community feels like the right word for the compilation. Both in terms of the gathered artists and the characters they bring to life. Because hearing the songs in different voices really brings home the diversity of personalities present across Owen’s work. Pedro the Lion adds a weariness to ‘My Sister’s Birthday’ with his distinctively gruff fondness. Claire Cronin is the perfect person to fully excavate the spookiness of ‘Pamela’. MJ Lenderman and Karly Hartzman raise a glass to poor old Christmas Steve. Sinai Vessel captures ‘Kitty Winn’ in all its sad affection.

Some, like Lisa/Liza‘s ‘Rabbits’ or Karima Walker‘s ‘Same Dream’, take the original versions back to the traditional folk roots, while the likes of Ylayali, Moon Racer and Bedbug lean into the electronic, harking back to earlier CFTPA days. What’s impressive is how the distinctive “Ashworthian” voice remains across the spectrum. Even the tracks with no literal voice, be it Robert Stillman‘s take on ‘Christmas in Nightmare City’ or Gordon Ashworth‘s extended guitar version of ‘Nephew in the Wild’, lose none of their ability to evoke the tales we’ve grown to hold so dear. Because while Dan might have intended to organise a birthday party, it turned out more like a reunion. A gathering of Owen’s characters, our friends. Still here, still living, still with so many stories to tell.

Cover painting by Martha Miller

The post You Were Alone: An Owen Ashworth Almanac appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“While it’s easy to cast [Ashworth] as the lonely boy in front of a keyboard, the truth, at least in my eyes, is that he’s often hardly there at all, a transparent gateway into the lives of people you’ve never met feeling things you thought you had to suffer through alone”

In Bloomington is a recording of a full-band Advance Base show from December 11, 2015, presumably in Bloomington. The date and locale aren’t the important part of that sentence though, rather the ‘full-band’ descriptor – what the press release describes as a ‘Dream Band’, assembled for two nights only. The line-up features players from Okkervil River, Shearwater, Mike Adams at His Honest Weight and Sun Kil Moon, as well as Ashworth’s previous project Casiotone For the Painfully Alone. To give them their full due, Ashworth (himself responsible for the Rhodes, autoharp, loops & vocals) is joined by Mike Adams (drums & Mellotron samples), Nick Ammerman (bass), Matthew Barnhart (guitar & tambourine), Edward Crouse (piano) and Howard Draper (lap steel guitar & tambourine) to flesh out the humble solo efforts into things far more exuberant and rich.

The setlist draws mainly from Nephew in the Wild but also contains three tracks from 2012’s equally great A Shut-In’s Prayer (an album which we described as “a tangle of hopes and nostalgia… melancholy without melodrama”) and even a rather nice rendition of Etiquette stand-out/eternal comfort, ‘Bobby Malone Moves Home’. As we’ve mentioned already, the full-band set up elevates the songs to another level, the communal effort managing to inject a certain amount of joy into even the most lonely characters, even if it’s just the small wonder of being alive.

In Bloomington is set for release on the 8th July both digitally and on vinyl, the latter coming with packaging illustrated by Dan Black of Landland. You can pre-order it now via Orindal Records. Those of you who live in North America will most likely have a good chance to catch Advance Base on tour this summer, with a whole host of dates lined up with some pretty cool people. Check out the list below:

June 01 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall &
June 02 – Pontiac, MI @ Pike Room at The Crofoot &
June 03 – Columbus, OH @ Double Happiness &
June 04 – Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop &
June 21 – Eau Claire, WI @ Ambient Inks
June 22 – Sioux Falls, SD @ Total Drag
June 26 – Gimli, Manitoba @ Real Love Summer Fest
June 27 – Duluth, MN @ Red Herring Lounge
June 28 – Minneapolis, MN @ Turf Club %
July 11 – Chicago, IL @ Subterranean ?
July 13 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
August 16 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout *
August 17 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop *
August 18 – Cincinnati, OH @ MOTR Pub *
August 21 – Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506 *
August 24 – Brooklyn, NY @ Silent Barn *
August 26 – Portland, ME @ Apohadion Theatre *^
August 27 – Bar Harbor, ME @ Lompoc Cafe *
August 28 – Montreal, Quebec @ Casa del Popolo *
August 29 2016 – Winooski, VT @ The Monkey House *
September 10 – Houston, TX @ The Satellite #
September 13 – Fayetteville, AR @ Nomads Music Lounge #
September 16 – St Louis, MO @ Foam #

& w/ Yoni & Geti
% w/ Air Traffic Controller
? w/ Told Slant, Bellows & Spencer Radcliffe
* w/ Hello Shark
^ w/ Lisa/Liza
# w/ Mike Adams at his Honest Weight

The post Advance Base unveils new live album, In Bloomington appeared first on Various Small Flames.

So as you can probably guess, Advance Base has announced a new album. Nephew in the Woods, coming this summer, will be Ashworth’s second full release under the Advance Base moniker, following his début A Shut-In’s Prayer (which we wrote about here) and his exalted spell as Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. The only bad news here is that weird sort of apprehension which surrounds a new release from one of your favourites, the faint possibility that they’ll betray your ideas of what makes them great, possibly alienating you in the process. What would I do if Ashworth reinvented himself and declared that lonely people are actually all nerds and recorded a decadent autotuned pop album about drinking champagne in gold-plated swimming pools with bikini-clad ladies?

Fear not! If the opening track ‘Tricia Please Come Home’ (which is streaming now over at Brooklyn Vegan) is anything to go by, we are in safe hands. It sees Ashworth plying his own unique brand of folk storytelling scored with lo-fi electronics. If that’s not enough, the press release will quell your fears:

“Sweetly sad stories about lonely Midwesterners trying to make sense of their troubled pasts… Disappearance, displacement, hell-raising, child-raising, Christmas, Michigan, arson, aging & animals are recurring themes throughout the album”

Nephew in the Wild is out on the 21st August via Orindal (North America) and Tomlab (UK/EU) and you can pre-order it right now.

The post Nephew in the Wild: a New Album From Advance Base appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Ashworth has just released Plastic Owen Band, a new “album” of covers, demos, compilation tracks and rarities produced between 2011 and 2014. The covers include Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bill Withers, Neil Young and even Casiotone’s own ‘Natural Light’.’Natural Light’ is classic Ashworth, a low-key, yearning song for a lost love. It is has lines like this:

“I got some news on you from a friend
you’re in Charlotte again
teaching Spanish at high school

he said you’re going by Joy
you cut your hair like a boy
& you don’t talk to your old friends

I found a picture from before the fight
we’re in natural light
& you’re sitting on my lap
like everything’s alright”

There’s also a remix of Advance Base’s ‘Summer Music’ (featuring Julie Byrne, who we wrote about here) which appeared on the aforementioned A Shut-In’s Prayer. It’s a great illustration of how a change of name has not meant a change of direction (or quality for that matter).

“There’s no comfort in sympathy
she’s upstate with her family
I’m still at the same address
I still believe I could love her best”

It also has a bizarre video in which Ashworth reveals himself to be a little fuzzy blue guy, a longlost inhabitant of Sesame Street.

Plastic Owen Band also has some rather nice instrumental tracks that show that Ashworth’s talents extend far beyond song writing. Advance Base has an album of them here, if you would like to hear more.

You can grab Plastic Owen Band on a pay-what-you-can basis right now.

P.S. If you’re not familiar with Ashworth’s work then please put that right immediately.

The post Advance Base – Plastic Owen Band appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The setlist is superb, although with a back catalogue like CFTPA’s there was small chance of it being anything different. The overwhelming majority of the songs are from Etiquette and Vs. Children, with ‘The Subway Home’ from the older album Pocket Symphonies for Lonesome Subway Cars. Sure, there are favourites missing, but there was always going to be without a five-disc set.

I’ll end up just waxing lyrical if I try to write anymore so I’ll leave it at that. In my humble opinion, Owen Ashworth is one of the best songwriters  from the past decade (I’d include him amongst the best writers full stop), and is someone you owe yourself to get acquainted with*. In Cambridge is available as a digital download or in lovely Coke bottle vinyl from Orindal. His label also do some great merch so have a look at that too.

*I ended up waxing lyrical. Apologies

The post Casiotone For The Painfully Alone – In Cambridge appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Advance Base sees Ashworth (along with Nick Ammerman, Edward Crouse, & Jody Weinmann) is an evolution from CFTPA but everything that made it so great remains intact. This is no chillwave side-project, no 80s inspired synth revolution, just an extremely talented lyricist doing what he does best. I think Casiotone songs manage to capture that nameless feeling in young people (especially in this day and age, I can’t speak for previous generations) of sadness even in everyday life. A tangle of hopes and nostalgia, the past and present and future. Melancholy without melodrama. I remember watching a video with David Foster Wallace where he comes across the same sort idea. The below quote is his attempt to address what he aimed to achieve with Infinite Jest:

“For the upper-middle class in the US, particularly younger people, things are often materially very comfortable and there is also often a great sadness and emptiness. It’s difficult to think about and difficult to come up with answers in the abstract.”

Advance Base continues this. Narratives unfold in Ashworth’s lugubrious voice, often very simple stories describing nothing more than ordinary life – situations that you or I could realistically find ourselves in, and that sense of emptiness is nailed down a bit better, it becomes easier to see. And of course acknowledging and sharing these feelings with the whole point of art. I would guess that the whole reason Wallace wrote in the first place was to attempt to fill the emptiness in himself and through that maybe help others.

The first album, ’A Shut-In’s Prayer’, is to be released on Orindal Records in the US (May 15th) and Tomlab in the UK (today apparently). If you haven’t heard CFTPA then please please please go back and explore all of the past releases. You won’t be disappointed.

The post Advance Base – A Shut-In’s Prayer appeared first on Various Small Flames.