From Kraftwerk to Leonard Cohen, The Smiths to Suicide, and Pet Shop Boys to Smog, Chicago’s one-man musical army Owen Ashworth – a.k.a Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - has been bracketed with all manner of illustrious names in the course of his eleven year career. But in collecting the 7-inch split-singles and compilation tracks he released from 2004-7 (all but two of them on CD for the first time), Advance Base Battery Life provides compelling evidence of the singular nature of this industrious film-school dropout’s talent.
If 2006’s sumptuously accomplished Etiquette was Casiotone For The Painfully Alone’s The Queen Is Dead, this is his Hatful of Hollow - a selection of formative fragments which add up to an utterly satisfying whole. In expanding his musical palette from minimal battery-powered electronics to include strings, flutes, tabla and pedal-steel, Ashworth has lost none of his miniaturist’s eye for detail. And his forensically acute two and three minute character-studies are all the more poignant for their (relatively) expansive new settings.
Download: Old Panda Days
Download: Optimist vs. The Silent Alarm (When the Saints Go Marching In)
Watch White Corolla:
If 2006’s sumptuously accomplished Etiquette was Casiotone For The Painfully Alone’s The Queen Is Dead, this is his Hatful of Hollow - a selection of formative fragments which add up to an utterly satisfying whole. In expanding his musical palette from minimal battery-powered electronics to include strings, flutes, tabla and pedal-steel, Ashworth has lost none of his miniaturist’s eye for detail. And his forensically acute two and three minute character-studies are all the more poignant for their (relatively) expansive new settings.
Download: Old Panda Days
Download: Optimist vs. The Silent Alarm (When the Saints Go Marching In)
Watch White Corolla:
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