Advance Base / Casitone for the painfully alone

From Songs For "Crap Kingdom:" A Young Adult Novel By DC Pierson
https://soundcloud.com/dc-pierson/sets/songs-for-crap-kingdom-a-young

Also available on the free Advance Base mixtape Plastic Owen Band: advancebase.bandcamp.com/album/plastic-owen-band

Motion Juice

Download it at advancebase.bandcamp.com/album/plastic-owen-band

Gordon Ashworth: autoharp
Owen Ashworth: autoharptron, bass synth, Omnichord, piano, rhythm box, sampler, vocals
Twila Ashworth: vocals
Julie Byrne: vocals

Summer Music Remix (feat. Gordon Ashworth & Julie Byrne)

Valley Girl was inspired by the agriculture and landscapes of Oakland, California and its  horizon of rolling hills. The peaks and valleys of the album's landscape are made of fifteen computer generated tones that cycle through melodies driven by ambisonic surround-sound locations to define space.

Computer tones were treated with phase-modulation of triangle waveforms to control the duty cycle of the sine tone. This created a prickly crispness and coiled release that enabled frequency registers to shift back and forth with various levels of control. I used my voice and vocal harmonizer with a midi arpeggiator to make a gated succession of notes in a more controlled frequency range.

The computer material was recorded live with little editing besides the addition of silence to accentuate vocals as a separate entity. The voice was then placed in the silences - or valleys - between melodies. The vocals were recorded live to tape from a parallel practice of recording processed voice improvisations with electronics.

Valley Girl evolves from the synthetic sounds I have been generating on computers for the past several years. When I perform live it typically involves computer synthesis. With the addition of processed voice in the silent spaces of the album five pieces, I have in a way marked the topography of Valley Girl with human traces.    - Madalyn Merkey, 2014

       

Madalyn Merkey - Archipelago

Download it at advancebase.bandcamp.com/album/plastic-owen-band

Lodi (CCR cover)

Mother funk Sunshine

NEPHEW IN THE WILD CD/LP/Digital out August 21, 2015
on Orindal Records & Tomlab Records
http://orindal.com (USA)
http://tomlab.com (EU/UK)

It’s been three years since Advance Base’s debut album, A Shut-In’s Prayer, made #19 on MOJO Magazine's Best Albums of 2012 list. Since then, singer, songwriter & multi-instrumentalist Owen Ashworth has published a book of drawings, made beats for Chicago rapper Serengeti, recorded the debut single by psych-folk troubadour Julie Byrne, paid tribute to gospel & outsider music legend Washington Phillips (see 2013’s The World Is In A Bad Fix Everywhere EP), contributed electric piano & co-writing credits to Sun Kil Moon’s critically acclaimed 2014 album, Benji, & produced more than a dozen other releases for his own label, Orindal Records. Ashworth has finally turned his focus back on his own music & given us Nephew in the Wild, the second official album by Advance Base.

Nephew in the Wild is a nostalgic, melancholic & occasionally harrowing collection of lo-fi indie rock & electronic pop. Electric pianos, drum kits, drum machines, autoharps, Omnichords, Optigans, Mellotrons & the occasional guitar lay the foundation for sweetly sad stories about lonely Midwesterners trying to make sense of their troubled pasts. In the world of Nephew in the Wild, the internet hasn’t been invented yet, & a person only has to pack up & move somewhere new if they never want to be heard from again. Disappearance, displacement, hell, child-raising, Christmas, Michigan, arson, aging & animals are reccuring themes throughout the album.

Nephew in the Wild was recorded by Ashworth in his basement in Oak Park, Illinois, with additional instrumentation by Nicholas Krgovich (No Kids, P:ano, Gigi), Mike Adams (Mike Adams at His Honest Weight, husband&wife), Howard Draper (Tre Orsi, Okkervil River, Shearwater) & Mat Sweet (Boduf Songs). Ashworth’s baritone vocals & frank, conversational lyrics sit at the front of the mix throughout nine of Nephew in the Wild’s ten songs, while guest vocalist Jody Weinmann takes the lead on the album’s only co-write, “My Love for You is Like a Puppy Underfoot.”

Personnel:
Owen Ashworth: autoharp, bass, drums, drum machines,
electric piano, Omnichord, piano, sampler & vocals
with
Mike Adams: synthesizer (5), drums (9)
Nick Ammerman: autoharp (7)
Edward Crouse: bass (7)
Howard Draper: lap steel guitar (3)
Emma Hospelhorn: bass (2)
Nicholas Krgovich: backing vocals (6), synthesizer (10)
Mat Sweet: guitar (9)
Jody Weinmann: Omnichord & vocals (7)

Produced by Owen Ashworth
Mixed by Owen Ashworth & Matthew Barnhart
Mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk

Trisha Please Come Home

Pamela (album version)

You wake from the same dream
where you get fat
& to your shock you give birth
to your old cat
your neighbor’s snoring
hear the parakeet
sit by the window
& stare down at the street
sunrise grey & orange streaks
thirty more weeks

The morning train
the crush & sound
it’s seventeen stops
before you get downtown
your stomach’s queasy
with flashes of heat
but maybe once that belly shows
you’ll get a seat
it roars & it creaks
thirty more weeks

Check rental listings
on your lunch at work
you could have a real house
if you just left New York
a vegetable garden
a white picket fence
closer to mom
& reasonable rents
a happy place for childhood memories
thirty more weeks

Same Dream (Version 2)

Advance Base