Ashtray Navigations - Snakestrings/Hollywood Taught You To Kiss 2xCDR (2008)
"Snakestrings is a trip through strings and soundboxes, Phil Todd plays esraj, kemence, electric sitar and guitars until the electronic instruments rebel and propel the whole thing into psychedelic overdrive. Hollywood Taught You To Kiss is based around another Todd/Crowley/Legard trio excursion. Dedicated to Sun Ra and Andy Warhol respectively."
This is really a fantastic release, one track per disk, each just over 40 minutes. This was limited to 99 copies, I ended up with 2 of them. Make one yours, now.
Here's what Foxy Digitalis had to say: "More double CD-R prolificy from Phil Todd’s thermal-riding Ashtray Navigations, here combining a solo track with a great suck-in of a collective performance. Still flying the ragged flag as patrician experimentalists, ‘Snakestrings’ is coiled oiled metal – a symphony of stretch and untailored moves. There are gentle revolutions throughout, cymbals swell like accumulating metal weather and drift off like the mild removal of a brain’s rust. The super tight guitar strings play off against the song’s slide into languidity, Todd’s soloing slowly feeling its way to some alchemical codex. A step-by-step previously unsullied route to something other, Todd is Hague level criminally underrated player and improviser.
Each disc runs over forty minutes, but “Hollywood Taught You to Kiss” is the further reaching trip. A slow burn of oscillations and spike-spined lulls, the trio of Todd, Phil Legard and Mel Crowley skirt the edge of instability with shirts untucked. There’s a focus with Ashtray Navigations that a lot of artists lose in improvisation, a turning of ideas that has Todd still keeping one hand on the controls. “Hollywood…” is an enormous spinning hog-wild dip into dilatory trajectories - its like watching journeying lights in the sky eyes clenched. In a case of an unavoidable, pointless and unnecessary toe-to-toe, “Snakestrings” triumphs purely on the grounds of its purer example of Phil Todd’s vision."