Wednesday 15 July 2015

Saturday 5 February 2011

Ink Clouds And Axe Revealer

Ashtray Navigations
Ink Clouds And Axe Revealer

Memoirs of an Aesthete 2010/1


Hand-numbered edition of 100 copies new full-length album from Phil Todd that takes the new age/H-Pop formula of the current crop of pretenders and dissolves it in honey-tone melodies, endless celestial shortwave and haunted exotica. This is ghostly psychedelic music for stoned memories of sunshine reverie, with blissed distant Hawaiian ragas melting into infinity while feedback chatters like birdsong. Other tracks take the arpeggiated cosmo-keys of Klaus Schulze/Heldon into new zones of hallucinatory sound with fantasy flutes and bubbling synth combining in heartbreakingly sad arcs of almost classical beauty. And when he rips out the fat fuzz guitar, well, it’s everything that you always thought Fripp & Eno’s “The Heavenly Music Corporation” was gonna sound like. I can’t think of any other UK group that so consistently – and without much fanfare – releases 100% killer forward thinking bombs like this. And this is one of their best to date.

Saturday 8 May 2010

still sealed & listening, an ashtray needs smokers

i don't think there ever really was a war between the square and the ashtray navigations, and if there is, i won't fight in it. i'm a musician. my job is playing strings, writing "songs", singing them out loud, getting them printed, observing, studying, learning how to become the kind of being who has something of worth to say. it's a great job.
phil todd is a connoisseur of his sonics, as is evident in his tone photographs, binary/analog output and his bountiful catalog as an esthete...a man who in many ways cannot be catalogued. he is one of the most underrated guitar players in all of great britain. his tastes are seemingly broad, but always decorated by his personal emblem...i will offer my synapses in tribute to uncork his monumental smoke. after all, a musician needs listeners.