Advance Base

Men who suffer don’t necessarily have to sing about their pain to melancholy guitar music – an alternative is to use simple computer sounds, resulting in a sound even more lonely and heartrending. Owen Ashworth proved this to the world with his legendary one-man project “Casiotone for the Painfully Alone”. In the middle of the last decade, the Chicago-based musician with the full beard established a new genre of digitally assisted singersongwriter music that has inspired introspective heroes all the way to James Blake. In 2010, Ashworth announced the end of Casiotone – but now he’s back with a new one-man project called Advance Base. His debut album “A Shut-In’s Prayer” is a collection of sad love songs, ballads and waltzes that sound superficially nice and trashy but under the surface, they are more finely interwoven than anything Ashworth has produced before. He sings of bygone loves, friends lost and alienation among close relatives. Advance Base will be giving its German debut during Foreign Affairs.