Music

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: Small and handmade and… over

John Rogers | Thursday 2 December, 2010 21:29

Owen Ashworth is most definitely in London. Shoreditch is screaming in the background of our call—car horns, sirens, roaring trucks and buses, trains rumbling overhead, passers-by shouting. He’s visited the city a lot these past few years, but this is the last time he’ll be here for a while. Because after fifteen years of writing and performing his keenly observed lo-fi ditties under the name Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, he’s decided to call it a day.

The project started slowly at the tail end of the last millennium, when Ashworth was studying film and creative creative writing. “I was using my answering machine, and some small battery powered keyboards that were the only instruments I had access to at the time,” he recalls. “I started writing and recording songs, maybe with the aspiration of having a band at some point to play with. But I was recording with a very rudimentary drum machine. It didn’t really sound like any music I was aware of at the time, and it was exciting to play with the sounds. The songs I was recording sounded kind of weirdly finished and possibly like something that could stand on its own.”

It didn’t take long for people to notice that there was something special about Ashworth’s writing. “A friend of mine who was booking shows at the time was into the recordings I was making and kind of coaxed me into doing a show,” he says. “I wasn’t recording with the intention of performing live, but she convinced me to do it. It was at a warehouse in San Francisco that isn’t there anymore. I opened the show and played a half dozen songs, and there were some really supportive friends and a surprisingly warm reception.”

The lo-fi, lean-to construction of Ashworth’s short songs are all part of their humble charm and the positive response was immediate. “At the first show I was invited to play a second show, and at the second show I was invited to play a third show… and I was invited to record a record. My friend Shawn Porter had a four track and so we went and recorded at his house back in the suburbs. I think we recorded five songs. I continued to make my own tape recorder music and releasing it in really small batches. I would just tape over the no-erase tabs on pre-recorded cassettes and just taped over them with small editions of whatever I was releasing at the time.”

After a few trips up and down America’s west coast with his friends and sometime flatmates The Rapture, Ashworth played a show in his native San Francisco with Xiu Xiu and was invited on his first national tour. The experience proved to be a decisive lesson in DIY music. “I had a realisation that I could do this on my own, and that I didn’t need anyone’s permission to do things like that,” he says. “I didn’t need a label or industry people, and it was a really blue-collar way to do it, booking shows myself and releasing music myself. So I released my first album, Answering Machine Music, on my own, with help from my friend Jessica Beard who was someone I went to school with. And it went really well, we printed an edition of 1000 CDs, and it went out of print.”

With the help of a local record store called Aquarius, CFTPA records started selling in larger numbers via mail-order. Ashworth refers to this as his first form of distribution, and it illustrates the organic, DIY mindset that’s made Casiotone what it is. It’s not just the songwriting and playing that’s self taught, it’s everything. “When I started out, I was playing small DIY shows at under the radar places. I liked booking the little shows, I knew the names of the people that were booking the shows, and they were just people who really supported the music and dedicated their time and their energy to small art spaces. My early shows were just in these tiny illegal venues.”

I ask what’s the most people he’s played to. “Well, I played some festivals. I played some larger shows opening for bigger bands – the last show of my last tour was at Masonic Temple in Brooklyn with Dan Deacon and Lightning Bolt, it was a pretty big crowd. People kind of get abstracted and it’s hard to remember that you’re playing for individuals on that big a stage with just a blurred mass of people in front of you. I generally prefer to play smaller shows, I feel more of a connection to the people.”

There’s something about this smallness and handmade quality that makes sense of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. His songs are personal, too – small studies of individuals, with an eye for matter-of-fact details that make his characters and situations feel very real. Are they based on real encounters? “There are a few songs that are true stories,” he explains, “but they usually aren’t true stories about me. Like on the last record there’s a song called ‘Tom Justice’, The Choirboy Robber that’s about a guy who I used to work in a movie theatre with who I found out later was also robbing banks at the same time. I wrote it based on the news articles that I’d read about him. I try to only write about things that are public knowledge and on the newswire and things like that. I feel pretty protective about the people I write about. Songs are sometimes inspired by real people but I change the detail, so I hope it’s not invading anyone’s privacy. The goal is mostly for me just to write good tunes, y’know.”

casiotone for the painfully alone – young shields by adamsun

And he’s been successful at it. His songs are loved to the point of being fetishised by his audiences, who don’t hold back in requesting and sometimes demanding their favourites at Casiotone shows. “People generally ask for more songs than I have time to play. People will often vocalise their frustrations that I don’t play their favourites, but I try to fit them all in and my songs are short.”

I ask if the shows have been longer on this farewell tour to accommodate more requests. “Well, I play about an hour, sometimes a little more, I prefer playing short shows, an hour is a compact performance. It depends on the energy and the attention span of the crowd.” And have the requests got more obscure as people try to catch the opportunity to see their favourite CFTPA songs live for the last time? “No, it’s quite predictable – I’ve made my setlist based on what people seem to want to hear. And I have some that I really like to play particularly… they change all the time, I’ll cycle through old songs. When you’re playing songs 40 nights in a row it’ll lose a little magic and become a little robotic. But right now I’m really enjoying playing ‘Harsh The Herald Angels Sing’, and there’s a song called ‘White on White’ that I really enjoy. It changes all the time.”

And is it quite a solitary being out on the road? Just Owen and his bag of instruments and clothes hopping public transport across the expanse of America? “It depends. Sometimes I’ll be travelling with other musicians I’m sharing the bills with, or someone who’ll be doing the driving. On this tour I’m with Jamie who’s driving the car and doing merch and things like that. But there have been tours of the US where I’m just driving by myself, or in Europe when I’ll be taking trains and buses by myself.”

I ask about the occasions Ashworth has toured with a band in tow. “I’ve played a lot more shows by myself. But I’ve done a few tours either hijacking friends bands, playing tour support and with a week just to cram, or there’s a few occasions where out of the kindness of friends I’ve been able to put a band together for a tour. My brother Gordon is also a musician so we’ve done tours together.”

Does he basically live on the road, or feel settled somewhere? “I live in Chicago and my wife and I own our apartment but I think I do about 100 or 150 shows a year,” he says. “The most I’ve done in a year was 200, but that was when I was single and I could spend most of my time travelling. That’s been my income, I haven’t had another job for six or seven years, I’ve been pretty busy with my shows.”

I ask about his final ever gig under the Casiotone name, on December 5th. “It’s in San Francisco, on the thirteenth anniversary of the first show I played. It seemed like an appropriate place to stop, so I’m going back home, see some old friends – it’s always been a very supportive city for me and always felt special playing there. The venue is called The Bottom Of The Hill, I’ve probably played ten times over the years, it’s pretty awesome.”

And will he miss life as Casiotone For The Painfully Alone? “I feel like I’m coming to a point in my life where I miss being at home, I need to spend more time on my own life, but it’s been a great experience and I’ve really enjoyed travelling.”
It won’t be the last we hear from Owen Ashworth: there’s already talk of studio collaboration with another strikingly observant lyricist, Yoni Wolf of the band Why?, and various other bits of production work on the back burner. So there’s plenty to look forward to, and maybe even the most fervent fan would agree that perhaps he’s earned the break.

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