ARTIST : Ashtray Navigations
TITLE: To Make A Fool Ask And You re The First
LABEL: Blackest Ever Black
YEAR: 2016
CONDITION: new and sealed
DESCRIPTION: "
Blackest Ever Black presents To Make A Fool Ask, And You Are The First,
the latest - and, for us, greatest - full-length entry in Ashtray
Navigations' uniquely important, uniquely sprawling – possibly sentient
and self-multiplying – discography.
It picks up where the nerve-damaged exotica of 2015’s A Shimmering
Replica left off...acerbic “surf” guitar and synthetic salt-breeze fit
for the Tropic of Yorkshire. Instant immersion in a potent, pungent
psychedelia that feels equal parts cosmic and aquatic. What Todd
wrenches out of his instrument these days is a language unto itself
(perhaps it always was)... a helical, ecstatic, grieving howl...a
(super)natural efflorescence, beyond earthly description or
transcription...ur-rock and post-everything. But equal emphasis is given
here to pulsating machine rhythms and lush keyboard textures, with
killer contributions from longtime fellow traveller Mel O'Dubhshlaine.
There were pre-echoes of all this in the recent(ish) Fluctuants and Aero
Infinite: but To Make A Fool feels like the culmination, or the fullest
expression, of something which was only glimpsed in those earlier
works. The side-long ‘Spray Two’ - gently eddying string-pads gradually
slashed to all f***k with fraught piano improvisations - is a
masterpiece in its own right. At its delirious peak, the whole thing
boils over into brooding, arpeggiated noir-techno – Michael Mann's
steadicam roaming Leeds' B-roads, some kind of tangerine nightmare -
before finally cooling into a bleary starfield of pure and sumptuous
hypno-tone. This LP is a trip, in the most skull-splitting,
soul-crinkling sense of the word, but it soothes and heals as well. A
circular and transformative journey to the other side of the underneath
and a landmark recording from one of the most adept and visionary nodes
in Britain's freakout underground."