Advance Base touts creature comfort
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FOR A man who’s made one of the best records of 2018, Owen Ashworth isn’t, strangely, one to suggest that he’s doing anything particularly new on Advance Base’s Animal Companionship.
“I’d say that 80 percent of writing songs is, for me, mimicry,” the DIY veteran says, on the line from his Chicago home. “I’m trying to recreate the feeling that other music has given me. What you make is personal and relevant for yourself, but I’m not bringing too much to pop songwriting that is wildly original.”
To fully appreciate the self-deprecating nature of that argument, consider what he’s achieved with Animal Companionship. The record is being framed as something of a loose concept album, one that revolves around the relationship that human beings have with their pets.
From a musical standpoint it’s beautiful stuff, the 12 tracks all softglow keyboards and Ashworth’s sadseason vocals made for sitting alone at 2 a.m. in a three-storey walkup, staring at the gently falling snow.
“I’ve always been really attracted to minimalist, hypnotic-feeling arrangements—that’s something that really compels me as a listener,” Ashworth says. “And when it comes to performing, there’s something really meditative about playing these songs. I was in a place in my life where I was really turning to music for comfort. So what I was writing was sort of ritualistic—a friend of mine has described it as holistic music, which I really liked. It really felt like, for my mental health, I needed these songs to be as gentle and meditative as they could be.”
Populating the tracks on Animal Companionship are dogs, parakeets, cats, and the other nonjudgmental critters that help us get through those times when life sometimes seems as much a burden as it is a blessing. Nowhere is the power of such creatures more moving than in “True Love Death Dream”, where, over gorgeous snowdrift synths, Ashworth tells the story of a pet owner who deals with the death of a loved one in a van crash by naming a dog after him, thereby ensuring his memory lives on.
The very real danger of making a record where the songs seem to revolve around a specific theme is that people will write things off as a dog record of interest primarily to dog people.
“I knew what I was doing with this record,” Ashworth says. “I was really looking for a hook when I was putting these songs together and trying to find a theme to write around. My early draft for the record had a lot more dog stuff going on, but some of those dog songs didn’t make the cut.”
Instead, Ashworth also found he had plenty to say about the human condition. Consider lyrics like “You could have a real house if you just left New York/a vegetable garden a white picket fence” from the melancholy marvel “Same Dream”.
The Chicago musician, who’s done time in the trenches with not only Advance Base but previous projects like Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, has obviously tapped into something with Animal Companionship. He notes that pet owners a-plenty have been showing up at Advance Base tour stops.
“It’s been really heartwarming to see how pet owners have responded to the record,” he muses. “There
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NESBITT CRAFTS CERAMICS INTO SYMBIOTIC INSTRUMENTS
CRINOIDAL BULBS. Architectural models of ruined walls from some lost Minoan city. The flat, broad, curved ribs of an unknown marine mammal. Roxanne Nesbitt’s ceramic creations hold both biomorphic and sculptural interest, as if they can’t quite decide whether they belong in a natural-history museum or an art gallery. But there’s more to them than just their rough-hewn aesthetic appeal; they’re also a new phylum of musical instrument.
Nesbitt calls them “symbiotic” or “parasitic” instruments, although she’s inclined to drop the latter term; it’s too negative for the entirely benign exchange she has in mind. Briefly, her ceramic creations are designed to sit on the strings of a piano or the skin of a drum, adding their own resonance and motion to the pre-existing sound. It’s not an entirely
original concept: Nesbitt’s ideas have something to do with John Cage’s “prepared piano”, in which the sound of a keyboard is modified by placing washers or screws between its strings; there’s also the African practice of nailing bottle caps to the top of an mbira to add jangling overtones to a percussive melody.
But those rely on found objects. Nesbitt’s symbiotic ceramics are perhaps the first instance of a composer designing entirely new soundproducing devices to interact with acoustic instruments.
“In a lot of ways, it was inspired by travelling, and also by wanting to hear new sounds,” Nesbitt tells the Straight in a telephone interview from her Vancouver studio. “Wanting to design new instruments, but also wanting them to be accessible. I kind of had the idea in mind that if I designed custom-made instruments from scratch, they would be very precious, I guess—or precious to me, and then I probably wouldn’t want to share them. So I’m just trying to make something that could add a lot, timbrally, to existing instruments.
“I’ve already sent five ceramic pieces to a percussion-and-piano duo in Ottawa,” she adds. “I was able to just mail them off in bubble wrap, kind of with the understanding that I’ll probably never see them again—and that’s okay, because I have patterns. I have a way to duplicate them easily.”
Vancouver audiences will have their first chance to experience musical symbiosis this weekend, when Nesbitt will unveil her instruments—and her colourful scores, which mix graphic elements with traditional notation—at the Western Front. Playing them will be pianist Lisa Cay Miller and percussionists Katie Rife and Ben Brown; trumpeter JP Carter and violinist Joshua Zubot are also part of the ensemble, but on unmodified instruments.
Milller, who often uses prepared piano in her own music, waxes effusive about Nesbitt’s sense of exploration and argues that the upcoming concert should appeal to more than just connoisseurs of the avant-garde. “It’s so visual, and so beautiful,” she says. “Oftentimes, with abstraction or something unusual, if there’s a way to enter in—some kind of permission or enticement—that can help. And her instruments are just so beautiful—you see the pictures of them, and you just want to see what they’re going to sound like.”
Whimsy is also part of the attraction, but that doesn’t undercut the seriousness of Nesbitt’s intent. Not only did she learn ceramics specifically for this project, she’s also drawing on her background in classical music, considerable experience as an electronic producer, and a master’s degree in architecture.
“I guess I’ve always been very handy,” she says. “Before I started making ceramic instruments, I’d made wood instruments. I used to make clothes and books and a lot of physical objects; when I did my master’s I did a lot of model-making and building things. So I have design skills, I guess.…and studying architecture has really influenced the way that I make music. I’ve learned to not be afraid of bringing new things into music, and working with them in a different way.”