15 YEARS OF ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS! 1994-2009
new produce! jan/feb 2009
ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS - TEN LAYER TERROR (Memoirs Of An Aesthete cdr) £5.00
Ten short pieces with the accent on brevity, for a change. Recorded in late '08, runs the usual Ashtray gamut - psych guitar flourishes, chugging synthesis and hard compresso-rock and all the rest, but in a less rambling timeframe....could possibly be described as "coming attractions" disc with a few sidelong glances in the rear view mirror.....limited to 100 copies on green vinyl CDRs
ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS - SAN FRANCISCO LOOPS (Memoirs Of An Aesthete cdr) £5.00
Three unearthed dark grooves from circa 2006/2007, rescued from under another label's tardy backside (yes, again). Snarling winter psych with a late 60s vertigo swirl in the tail, now bundled up with a long 35 minute space-out of more recent providence and packaged up with love for YOU...100 copies only of course....
ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS - SUGAR HEAD RECORD (Deep Water Acre 2xcdr) £9.00
"Over the past decade and a half, Phil Todd's long-lived & insanely prolific Leeds-based outfit has been boggling adventurous heads with infinite variations on its central uber-maximalist noise/psychedelic/ur-drone forms. AN have always been masters of the long take, and Sugar Head Record features just three mostly-Todd tracks: Disc 1 is entirely filled by "Sugar Head Music with Sines", an hour of undulating electronic tapestry swathed in layers of gooey psychedelic lava. Disc 2 leads with "Orange Matter Custard", nine minutes of Todd's patented modal guitar extremity, strings shredding off into pure electrification; and closes with the colorfully-titled "Toilet Training", adding regular collaborators Phil Legard (Xenis Emputae Traveling Band) and Melanie Crowley (Ocelocelot) for 43 minutes of glacially-paced swells of electrical haze. For already tuned-in households, a totally necessary release; for virgins, well, with AN it's all the deep end, so this is as good a place to dive in as any."
ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS / STELLAR OM SOURCE / FAMILY BATTLESNAKE - HOW DO SIAMESE TWINS ARRANGE THEIR LOVE LIVES? (Editions Zero LP) £11.00
Three way basement levitations from the bottom of the well, served up for you on a vinyl LP by this incredible Greek label. Two lads, two lasses, four (!) analogue synths, electric sitar and air fx drum. Edition of 300 copies.
OCELOCELOT - SUPERPOULETMERDE (Smokers Gifts cdr) £5.00
New solo release from frequent Ashtray Navigator-collaborator Melanie Crowley. Super overdriven oscillator rhythms, Prolapsing electronic garbage sound and snarling doom drone over five tracks. Try and shape up and dance to this and you'll probably pop your patella.
ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS - EARLY YEARS/TAPE MUCK 1994-1997 (Revival 10 x cdr £37.00)
Finally, a second edition of this long sold out early years excavation, this time packaged in more prosaic white card boxes rather than film cans (so the buyers of the first edition can retain their superiority complexes) - limited to only 50 copies so be quick.
includes the following early cassette releases - A SEISMOGRAPHIC RESEQUENCING OF THE HUMAN BRAIN PARTICLES, DRAIN'D, BEAUTY MYTH, A SPIKE THROUGH THE HEART OF JELLY, BICYCLE GLUE BLUES, THE TRIAL OF DOCTOR SPOCK, DESTALINISATION CASSETTE, EASTER-EXIT, PLEASE STOP BREATHING, NIGHTMARISH VISIONS GLIMPSED BEHIND SEALED EYELIDS, BLEACHED BONES - MOVING COIL, THE MESSAGE IS PURE, LAST SONG OF THE DEAD WOLF, PLASTIC, QUARTZ, FAUVIST (DISTASTE)...all remastered but thankfully not de-hissed! 12 HOURS PLUS OF SIZZLING FUN!
" the earliest things were done in the perfect environment of nowheresville, not Tokyo, NYC or even Leeds but a small industrial town in the middle of England, for an audience of pretty much myself - you could forget about gigs or a release on a local label unless you played "normal" punk/metal or covers or what have you. I had very few instruments, mostly junk, and a rotting four track bought off the legendary Al Monger for about thirty quid I think. There was nobody else I knew back then doing this sort of thing. I had never done this kind of thing before. There were a lot of bongos and ukeleles put through analogue echo boxes. Later a stylophone and an antique moog. The guitar eventually fell apart and I never had an amp. Someone taped me some early power electronics things and some home-made folk/psych records and they sounded like the kind of things I could do with the gear and "technique" in my possession back then. Since then all of those things have been reissued on CD or on Mutant Sounds now, but sometimes I prefer the sound of the nth generation cassette copies I had back then. Early Ashtray Navigations always sounded like the nth generation cassette copies I had back then. There was a burgeoning cassette underground back then in the mid-90s but I don't know if too many people were paying attention other than us. Nearly everything here precedes the first Betley 7 inch and the Siltbreeze LP and it was a strange joy to hear it hiss once more..."
restock! ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS - TO YOUR FUCKING FEATHER'D WINGS (Gold soundz/Absurd cd) £8.00
got some more of these - nearly sold-out CD from 2003, this is your last chance!
more ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS still available as well, should you so desire...best to email first to check they're still in stock
CDRs
SKEWEWRED BY CLOUDS (memoirs of an aesthete) £5.00
a few copies left of the second edition of this stormy monster featuring Todd, Crowley and Arttu Partinen of AVARUS, HETEROSKELETON etc.
THE CREAM WHEEL (no label) £5.00
a few remaining copies of the second edition of this limited tour CDR. very minimal and abstract solo Todd wares
SNAKESTRINGS / HOLLYWOOD TAUGHT YOU TO KISS (no label) £7.00
double CDR! two tracks each exceeding 40 minutes. Snakestrings (i.e. disc 1) is a trip through strings and soundboxes, Phil Todd plays esraj, kemence, electric sitar and guitars until the electronic instruments rebel and propel the whole thing into psychedelic overdrive. Hollywood Taught You To Kiss (i.e. disc 2) is based around another Todd/Crowley/Legard trio excursion. Dedicated to Sun Ra and Andy Warhol respectively. Limited to 99 numbered copies.
"More double CD-R prolificy from Phil Todd’s thermal-riding Ashtray Navigations, here combining a solo track with a great suck-in of a collective performance. Still flying the ragged flag as patrician experimentalists, ‘Snakestrings’ is coiled oiled metal – a symphony of stretch and untailored moves. There are gentle revolutions throughout, cymbals swell like accumulating metal weather and drift off like the mild removal of a brain’s rust. The super tight guitar strings play off against the song’s slide into languidity, Todd’s soloing slowly feeling its way to some alchemical codex. A step-by-step previously unsullied route to something other, Todd is Hague level criminally underrated player and improviser. Each disc runs over forty minutes, but “Hollywood Taught You to Kiss†is the further reaching trip. A slow burn of oscillations and spike-spined lulls, the trio of Todd, Phil Legard and Mel Crowley skirt the edge of instability with shirts untucked. There’s a focus with Ashtray Navigations that a lot of artists lose in improvisation, a turning of ideas that has Todd still keeping one hand on the controls. “Hollywood…†is an enormous spinning hog-wild dip into dilatory trajectories - its like watching journeying lights in the sky eyes clenched. In a case of an unavoidable, pointless and unnecessary toe-to-toe, “Snakestrings†triumphs purely on the grounds of its purer example of Phil Todd’s vision". 9/10 -- Scott McKeating (2 July, 2008) Foxy Digitalis
SURPLS PROVNCL HRBS (no label) £5.00
six brief solo Phil Todd tracks, works great as an Ash Nav sampler or somesuch - ltd.100 in spraypainted clamshell package
FOUR RAGA MOODS (revival) £5.00
CDR reissue of the 1st Ashtray CD from 1997. ltd.100
THOSE ARE PEARLS THAT WERE HIS EYES (revival) £5.00
reissue of 1998 Solipsism CDR, one long track with transformative powers. Scary. Ltd.100
A MAYFLOWER GARLAND (memoirs of an aesthete) £5.00
reissue of 2000 Outer Orbit LP, mostly played on toy instruments. Brief and invigorating
CHOCOLATE CONCRETE (collaboration with SARAH'S CHARITY) (no label) £5.00
3 inch CDR. live collaboration recorded at the legendary Deaf Forever all-dayer fiasco. Ltd. 75 very few left
CD
THE LOVE THAT WHIRRS (last visible dog) £8.00
supersession with Phil Todd, Alex Neilson, Mel Crowley & Ben Reynolds. intensely layered psych, the only "real" CD we still have available right now
LPs
ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS - RED CULTURE LP (MOA LP 2)............ £7
FEW COPIES LEFT!
vinyl LP reissue of long out of print CDR from 2006. Limited to 220 numbered copies in red vinyl. one of the most popular Ashtray Navigations releases with the Todd/Crowley/Legard band in full force. here's what the FOXY DIGITALIS site had to say about the original CDR release... Ashtray Navigations have released many CDRs and come up with some pretty sick album titles (e.g. "Some Cat Lost In His Own Picture", "Never Grew Out Of Being Holden Caulfield"). This new-ish installment, "Red Culture", gathers together 3 tracks of kaleidoscopic noise by the trio line-up of Todd, Delaney, Legard--recorded in a single day. I'm usually interested in small runs and personal touches with records. This CDR doesn't disappoint. It's hand-numbered and housed in a spray-painted clamshell case. You could say Ashtray offer a tonic for modern My Space culture. They compete with the deluge of mp3s most bands distribute by releasing fuck loads of CDRs (maybe around 1 a month) instead. HOW TO MAKE A VORTEX IN SOUND. "Railroad Poet" kicks off the disc and is its centrepiece: 25 minutes of increasingly frenzied psych. The initial cross-legged keyboard tinkering is soon swamped with fuzz. The volume increase. Tension rises until the guitars are screaming and it feels like the walls are about to melt. Finally, hypnotic drums (well into-the-red, of course) pull this vortex of sound in around the kit to create a heaving stasis of sweat. Nice. The disc winds down with 2 shorter tracks. "iPod Catastrophe" trades screaming sonic love for disorientation and claustrophobia. The band employ scummy guitar tones and bleating tinitus electronics to make you feel like you've drunk far too much at a party and can't register anything beyond "ugh", until luckily someone turns it off. "Bitter Lemon Licks" wraps up the set in sparse style. No guitars this time, just paranoid drone, some loose tambourine and cymbal action, and skittering electronics that sound like angry rats darting between the speakers. 8/10 -- Matt Lindley (9 October, 2006) A MONUMENT TO BRITISH ROCK (Smokers Gifts) £30.00
triple LP reissue of a former double CDR release. features Todd, Reynolds, Neilson & Crowley. Hit up Google for rave reviews! Ltd.300, selling fast.
tape
NACKT INSECTEN / ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS (sick head) £4.00
40 minute spilt tape with these esteemed Glaswegian magic carpet voyagers, in nice chunky box like an old computer game, very few left
postage:
UK: LP - £2 first, £1 each after CD - £1 first, 25p each after
europe: LP - £3 first, £1 each after CD - £1.50 first, 50p each after
rest of world: LP - £4 first, £1.50 each after CD - £2 first, 50p each after
paypal as usual to - [email protected] for anything at all, [email protected]
ashtray navigationssssssssssssince 1994 ashtraynavigationssssssare or were siltbreeze betley welcomes careful drivers american tapes staalplaat gameboy tonschacht last visible dog ikusiuus absurd chocolate monk gold soundz rhizome memoirs of an aesthete spirit of orr celebrate psi phenomenon etcetcetc recording artistes say bonjour at ashtraynavigations(a)hotmail.comA MONUMENT TO BRITISH ROCK TRIPLE LP STILL AVAILABLE ON SMOKERS GIFTS£30 inc postage and packing in Europe and UK, paypal to nospam_ashtraynavigations(at)hotmail.com_
