Revolver Guide To CMJ 2010

TUESDAY OCTOBER 19TH

TIMES NEW VIKING
New York @ Irving Plaza: CMJ Showcase - Ground Control Booking
   
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 20TH

BATHS
New York @ Cake Shop: CMJ Showcase - Terrorbird


HOLY GHOST!   
New York @ Bowery Ballroom: CMJ Showcase - DFA


LOWER DENS   
Brooklyn @ Don Pedros: CMJ Party - Impose Magazine
New York @ Santos Partyhouse: CMJ Party - Stereogum/Popgun
Brooklyn @ Bruar Falls: CMJ Showcase - Chouette

THURSDAY OCTOBER 21ST
 

GREG ASHLEY  
New York @ Bruar Falls: CMJ Showcase - Blackout Booking

 
BATHS
New York @ Pianos: CMJ Chowcase - I Guess I'm Floating

CIRCLE PIT
Brooklyn @ Shea Stadium: CMJ Party - Hardly Art Party w/ Woven Bones, La Sera, Golden Triangle, Fergus and Geronimo, Xray Eyeballs

HUMAN EYE
New York @ Bruar Falls: CMJ Showcase - Blackout Booking

 LOWER DENS
Brooklyn @ Knitting Factor: CMJ Showcase - Mexican Summer
Brooklyn @ Union Pool: CMJ Showcase - Sinister Foxy


THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART
Brooklyn @ Music Hall of Williamsburg: CMJ Showcase - Brooklyn Vegan

FRIDAY OCTOBER 22ND

BATHS   
Brooklyn @ Knitting Factory: CMJ Showcase
Brooklyn @ Brooklyn Bowl: CMJ Showcase - Pitchfork

MATTHEW DEAR 
New York @ Webster Hall: CMJ Showcase - Windish

LOWER DENS   
Brooklyn @ Public Assembly: CMJ Party - Brooklyn Vegan
New York @ Rockwood Music Hall: CMJ Party - Windish Agency

SATURDAY OCTOBER 23RD

BATHS
Brooklyn @ Glasslands: CMJ Showcase - PopGun


CIRCLE PIT
Brooklyn @ Knitting Factory: CMJ Showcase - Panache w/ AIDS Wolf, Ty Segall, Turbo Fruits, Heavy Cream, Pujol, Tog, Screens

LOWER DENS   
Brooklyn @ Southpaw: CMJ Party - Rooftop Films party
New York @ Arlenes Grocery: CMJ Party - Windish Agency Day Party
New York @ Bowery Ballroom: CMJ Showcase - VFW

TY SEGALL 
New York @ Knitting Factory: CMJ Showcase - Panache, w/ Heavy Cream, Turbo Fruits, Pujol, Prince Rama

Ashley's Painted Garden On Dusted

Referencing Roky Erickson, Skip Spence and Van Dyke Parks, Dusted Magazine.com gives a thorough review of Greg Ashley's latest solo work.

Artist: Greg Ashley
Album: Painted Garden
Label: Birdman
Review date: Mar. 21, 2007

With each successive album, whether solo or with his band the Gris Gris, Oakland’s Greg Ashley continues to both refine and expand on his version of the New Weird American sound. While Ashley isn’t a visionary in the same sense as Roky Erickson and Skip Spence (or other turned-on musical drop-outs from the Love Generation), he’s certainly indebted to them and travels similar musical lost highways. In the case of the above – easily identified, though certainly not the only, precedents of Ashley’s – their genius and legacy is forever intertwined with psychosis and reclusion. I know very little about Greg Ashley as his past relates to the hard times Spence and Erickson fell upon, but it’s equally as irrelevant to understanding and appreciating his music, as knowing about Roky and Skip’s time in an asylum is to being moved by The Evil One or Oar.

Still, Ashley makes some seriously far-out sounds. The basic musical template of Painted Garden, as on 2004’s Medicine Fuck Dream, is simple enough: pop songs built on folk, country, and blues forms, with an occasional nod to classic R&B (“Pretty Belladonna”) or Songbook. But Ashley takes these familiar sounds and drapes them in all manner of ethereal soundscapes, bells and whistles, hallucinogenic found sounds and free jazz skronk. While distorting a roots template with reverb and fractured constructions is nothing new in 2007, the tension that Ashley creates between the melodic and more warped elements in his songs is indeed unique. Unlike other spacey contemporary troubadours, Ashley's hooks certainly aren’t buried or meandering, in fact they’re quite immediate – at times positively toe-tapping (“Fisher King”), at others, hauntingly beautiful (“Caroline and the Orange Tree,” “Sailing With Bobby”) – but they exist wonderfully at odds with a production aesthetic that transports them from the terrestrial to the celestial. Medicine Fuck Dream, however, was a decidedly more lo-fi affair than what we’re given here. And while Painted Garden occasionally hints at the sort of slick, expansive cosmic sheen Dave Friedman has made de rigueur, thankfully that sound is merely a single element of a diverse yet fully cohesive and even-sounding recording.

Ashley’s music has a built-in awareness of American musical history, which makes clear that he’s not working in some sort of vacuum, running on his own twisted creative energy and that alone. In fact, I’m willing to wager his record collection is a stunner. Yet, his synthesis of those various forms – finger-picking folk songs, soul ballads, Sun Ra-style cosmic jazz, Tin Pan Alley pop – still feels organic and original. With that in mind, another ’60s oddball worth referencing would be Van Dyke Parks. Yet, where Parks cloaked everything in irony and knowing glances, Ashley makes the whole synthesis seem completely unaffected and true.

By Nate Knaebel


Greg Ashely tour dates galore:
03/29 Dallas, TX @ Double-Wide
03/30 Memphis, TN @ The Hi-Tone
03/31 Atlanta, GA @ 11:10 Teahouse
04/01 Nashville, TN @ The Springwater
04/02 Cincinnati, OH @ The Comet
04/03 Columbus, OH @ Caraba
04/04 Akron, OH @ Lime Spider
04/05 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland
04/06 Kalamazoo, MI @ Kraftbrau
04/07 Toronto, ON @ Rancho Relaxo
04/08 Hamilton, ON @ The Casbah
04/09 Ottawa, ON @ Babylon
04/10 Montreal, QC @ Zoo Bizarre
04/11 Boston, MA @ PA's Lounge
04/14 Brooklyn, NY @ Uncle Paulie's
04/15 Washington, DC @ Red & Black
04/18 Rochester, NY @ The Bugjar
04/20 Athens, OH @ The Union (Blackout Fest w/Miss Alex White)
04/21 Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick
04/22 Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen
04/23 St. Paul, MN @ Big Vs
04/24 Fargo, ND @ The Aquarium
04/26 Seattle, WA @ The Sunset Tavern
04/27 Vancouver, BC @ Pat's Pub
04/28 Portland, OR @ Slabtown