Advance Base with Karima Walker and Lisa/Liza

Advance Base, the electronically tinged indie-pop vehicle of Owen Ashworth (Casiotone for the Painfully Alone), returns to SPACE on a special Christmas tour.

Advance Base is the melancholic soft rock recording project of Chicago, IL singer/songwriter Owen Ashworth (formerly of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone). Using a two-handed arsenal of electric piano, Omnichord, samplers, effect pedals & drum machines, Ashworth builds minimalist, heavy-hearted, & nostalgia-obsessed ballads around his conversational baritone. The warm, electronic sound of Advance Base has been described as “lo-fi,” “depressed” & “weirdly uplifting.”

Animal Companionship, the third & most recent “studio” album by Advance Base, was released September 21, 2018 by Run For Cover Records / Orindal Records. GoldFlakePaint & Various Small Flames both listed Animal Companionship among their favorite albums of 2018. Since then, Advance Base has released Wall of Tears & Other-Songs I Didn’t Write, a home-recorded collection of (mostly) country/Americana covers arranged for electronic instruments & Live at Home, a collection of mid-quarantine livestream concert performances & the closest representation of an Advance Base live set commercially available. A new single titled ”Little Sable Point Lighthouse” was released on March 31, 2022.

“It’s with no exaggeration we describe Owen Ashworth as one of the most consistent and important songwriters in contemporary indie music. From the earliest Casiotone For the Painfully Alone demos to most recent Advance Base single ‘Little Sable Point Lighthouse‘, Owen has crafted a catalogue of characters and circumstances with few rivals in the modern era. His is an ever evolving body of work which stands out in its deftness and humility and empathy and care, bringing to life individuals from across the spectrum of human experience while remaining unerringly attuned to the tender, fallible heart at the centre of each.” – Various Small Flames

“A Raymond Carver short story collection set to music by a Joan of Arc-era OMD” – MOJO Magazine

Tucson, Arizona interdisciplinary artist Karima Walker walks a line between two worlds. Aside from her long resume of collaborative work with artists in the diverse fields of dance, sculpture, film, photography and creative non-fiction, Walker has long nurtured a duality within her work as a musician, developing her own sonic language as a sound designer in tandem with her craft as a singer/songwriter. The polarity within Walker’s music has never been so articulately explored, or graced with as much intention, as on her new album, Waking the Dreaming Body.

Waking the Dreaming Body was written, performed and engineered entirely by Walker, with the exception of some subtle upright bass from C.J. Boyd on the song “Window I.” Producing the album on her own wasn’t Walker’s original intention, though; after flying to New York in November 2019 to develop some home-recorded tracks with The Blow’s Melissa Dyne, a sudden illness forced Walker to cancel the sessions and return home to Tucson to recover, and soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic ruled out the possibility of a return trip to New York.

Instead, Walker decided to finish the album herself in her makeshift home studio. She spent the following months recording, processing and arranging her self-described “messy Ableton sessions” into densely harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and her own dulcet singing voice, allowing trial, error and intuition to guide her way. The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient compositions (as in the instrumentals “Horizon, Harbor Resonance” and “For Heddi”) and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting (as in the lyrics-focused tracks “Reconstellated” and “Waking the Dreaming Body”), their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night’s dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming.

And they tell you all your life
‘Search for that infinite sound’
When no one else is around
You hear it too
In the shelter of a song

–Lisa/Liza, “From This Shelter”

You may be more familiar with Lisa/Liza than you know, if you’ve ever tromped home through the pines as nighttime kicks in, or taken in a long breath as the midday sun warmed your face.

Lisa/Liza is the songwriting project of Liza Victoria, developed within Maine’s strange and wonderful DIY music scene. She has toured nationally with Jens Lekman and Advance Base and shared bills with Angel Olsen, Kaki King, Lucy Dacus, and Julie Byrne.

Lisa/Liza’s catalog spans ten years, with four albums on Orindal Records, a single released through Mexican Summer’s Looking Glass, and a spate of self-released home recordings. Her songwriting invites traditional folk guitar-playing and lyricism into dream-like domains, directing memory’s imperfections toward restoration and healing.

On her latest album, Breaking and Mending, the heavy, open-ended waltzes of her past work assume a more linear form, as Lisa/Liza carries on her tradition of shedding light on personal trauma and life’s greater mysteries through song. Questions about love and the natural world are met with moments of clarity, sparked by recollections of Judee Sill or John Prine. Above all, Breaking and Mending deals in dualities and the beauty of self-reconstruction, as carefully underlined in the opening track, “Felt Twice”:

They tell me ‘the body minds,’
they said that, the mind was the body,
Well each time that I fell,
I felt twice,
What else can I tell everybody?