Advance Base is the project of Owen Ashworth, one of American indie music’s great miniaturists. Ashworth first made his name as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, which he started in San Francisco in 1997 after dropping out of film school. That project ran on a set of almost Dogme-like rules: short songs, played in C, using only the white keys of cheap Casio keyboards. Over five albums on Tomlab, from Answering Machine Music to Vs. Children, it became a cult touchstone for lo-fi bedroom songwriting.
Ashworth retired the Casiotone name with a final show on 5 December 2010, thirteen years to the day after its first, and re-emerged in Chicago as Advance Base. In 2011 he founded his own label, Orindal Records, which has released his own records alongside work by artists including Gia Margaret and Dear Nora. Advance Base albums such as A Shut-In’s Prayer, Nephew in the Wild and Horrible Occurrences keep the warm electric-piano glow of the old project but give his character sketches more space and more patience.
Animal Companionship, released on Run For Cover Records in 2018 and home to ‘Your Dog’, is a loose concept album about people and their pets. Dogs, cats and parakeets wander through its twelve songs, though as ever with Ashworth the animals are really a way into grief, loneliness and tenderness: one song concerns a pet owner who names a dog after a loved one killed in a van crash. Ashworth has said an early draft contained even more dog songs, and that he was turning to music for comfort while making it.
He is disarmingly modest about his craft, describing around 80 per cent of songwriting as ‘mimicry’, an attempt to recreate feelings other records once gave him, and admitting a lifelong attraction to minimal, hypnotic arrangements. Being teetotal, he prefers DIY spaces to bars, playing bookshops, record shops and community halls, and on the Animal Companionship tour fans regularly brought their dogs along to the gigs, which he found deeply heartwarming.
