Ashtray Navigations – One From Then Another

Fourth Dimension

Ashtray Navigations are something of a nightmare to write about.

I’ve got a few albums of theirs and they’re all bangers and they’re in the realm of ‘bands you really should see’, despite the fact they don’t seem to play near me anywhere near as much as I’d like on account of my being nowhere near Leeds.

The problem is that their discography is too sprawling to really say much about how a record sits in their trajectory. Discogs has 109 albums listed and I’d be surprised if that was low-balling, given the nature of short-run releases and record-keeping in DIY scenes.

Perhaps you have an AshNav bingo card. If you do, you can cross out “sounds ’80s Miles Davis if he was a bit dirtier” and “I swear that was Tangerine Dream” with this release.

First track, “Drink The Moment Thin Fox Legs”, starts off all cowbell and funky asymmetrical shapes, but mutates relentlessly into all sorts of realms — spacey synth sounds and feedbacking drift, pretty wobbly keys, heroic spaghetti western by drugs binge. Last record of theirs I got was suffused with Funkadelic, so I’m wondering if the funk has actually been a part of AshNav for a while now.

For my money, they’re a funny proposition insofar as I could imagine the sort of thing that this record has being massively appealing to a certain sector of people — like I’m sure old weird funk and prog business is massive in some quarters and AshNav are not far away from “what if Funkadelic repeated Maggot Brain a few more times?” It’s a shame, in that context, that they’re most readily associated with noisy underground-y stuff, because I could well imagine this appealing to the £40+ weird ’70s funk re-issue brigade.

Everything AshNav does has a particular melted feel to it and that’s very much present here. Moments which are not massively dissimilar to something like Philip Jeck‘s uncanny loops. Dialogues about drug music are usually pretty stultified, but there’s a sense for me that AshNav lend themselves to being a band to take drugs to for the twenty-first century.

And if that’s not your vibe, there’s bits and bobs that’ll remind you of slinky shiny kraut-y vibes, Keith Rowe-ian tremelo, the sort of expansive wash of Acid Mothers Temple or basically a load of Freq-friendly fare. I was also reminded of Spiritualized which I appreciate not everyone’s up for, but I’m standing by Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space as one of the better kraut expositions in the 90s.

Second track is “Return Of The Sun Of Dr. Artur” and I appreciate the old-world grammaticism of Dr. with an uppercase D and a full stop. It’s all about the details, you see. It might be that this record is joined together by a theme of contracting and expanding between funky rhythmic sections and drifty wash. It’s a really effective thing — insofar as it gives an impression of structure (these may be fully composed or improvisations — difficult to tell and probably not important to draw the line).

So you get bits that sound like the Tomorrow’s World theme underwater, a plaintive cornet (?) section, angry refrigerator / frozen bee synths. Tempos shifting within the same song and different elements sliding in and out of the foreground and pulling the music in a load of directions. Some outrageous whammy usage.

The proposition of AshNav in 2023 is maybe difficult insofar as they do release a lot of records and if, like me, you’ve got completist problems, then it’s difficult to push this over another record. Which seems unfair, because this maintains the high quality of the last few AshNav releases I’ve heard. What I’ll say though, is that the AshNav records I’ve heard from the last few years have really been worth it insofar as they do seem to have developed this habit of being loads of genres at once.

It’s not necessarily apparent on the first pass, but the musicality of what used to be a kind of a lo-fi, noisy dronescapes band is massively laudable and perhaps there’s a biographer sticking this album in a pile marked “peak 2020s AshNav – 5*”.

-Kev Nickells-