Advance Base

Owen Ashworth crafts emotionally charged indie pop under the Advance Base name, having earlier led the cult indie electronic project Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. That outfit issued multiple albums and maintained a relentless touring schedule from 1997 until 2010, after which Ashworth retired the endeavor and launched Advance Base in 2011. The newer work mixes acoustic instruments with restrained electronics, as heard on the 2015 album Nephew in the Wild and 2018’s Animal Companionship, both of which foreground his restrained vocal delivery and emotionally direct lyrics. Horrible Occurrences, a 2024 concept album set in the fictional town of Richmond, followed.

Born in Redwood City, California, in 1977, Ashworth began recording lo-fi pop on inexpensive Casio keyboards in 1997, pairing wry yet sincere lyrics with bright, economical melodies. Five full-length releases on the German indie label Tomlab, plus assorted singles and EPs, traced CftPA’s steady artistic expansion through more ambitious arrangements and occasional songs that stood alongside the finest work of the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt.

Ashworth ended both the CftPA project and its catalog in 2010 yet planned to keep writing new material. The next year, after moving from the West Coast to Chicago, he introduced Advance Base—named after his studio and after CftPA’s 2009 singles-and-rarities collection Advance Base Battery Life. Early Chicago performances led to modest tours alongside Concern, the ambient project of his brother Gordon Ashworth, as well as the Donkeys, the Rapture, and others. A handful of limited 7-inch singles appeared, including splits with Concern and Hello Shark, while Ashworth, an avid hip-hop listener, co-produced Serengeti’s Family & Friends for Anticon.

Advance Base issued its debut full-length, A Shut-In’s Prayer, in May 2012. Mark Kozelek, who had previously covered the CftPA song “Natural Light,” put the CD out on Caldo Verde, and Ashworth’s own Orindal Records handled the vinyl. The widely praised record reflected further growth in songwriting and production, adding richer detail along with greater prominence for piano and autoharp alongside keyboards and drum machines. Subsequent touring included runs with Ben Gibbard, Hello Shark, and Nicholas Krgovich, and the limited cassette Instrumentals #1 collected vocal-free versions of Ashworth’s Serengeti collaborations. Serengeti’s 7-inch EP Be a Man, containing two more Advance Base features, also surfaced in 2012.

In 2013 Advance Base released the EP The World Is in a Bad Fix Everywhere, comprising songs originally written by the legendary early-20th-century Texas street preacher Washington Phillips. That same year the cassette Tomorrow’s Homes Today presented Ashworth’s reinterpretation of the Magnetic Fields’ 1992 EP The House of Tomorrow. He also contributed to Sun Kil Moon’s Benji, which appeared in early 2014 and quickly ranked among the year’s most acclaimed albums. After numerous live dates and several Orindal releases by other artists plus two CftPA live LPs, Advance Base delivered its second album, Nephew in the Wild, in 2015. The live set In Bloomington followed in 2016. Animal Companionship, the third Advance Base full-length, was tracked in Los Angeles with longtime CftPA associate Jason Quever and issued in 2018. Live at Home and the covers collection Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write appeared in 2021. Six years after the previous collection of originals, the spare yet richly detailed Horrible Occurrences arrived in 2024.