Music

Slip Inside This House

Gris Gris frontman Greg Ashley makes pop oddities with pocket change

By Jennifer Maerz 

City living creates a tendency to shove the music you like into competitions with other attention hogs. When you're just one of a million maggots, hooks that compete with skyscraper cranes and choruses slick as makeup counters can mentally transport you away from the congestion. One iPod click generates beats overriding jackhammers, while the next soundtracks the Muni commute toward the paycheck slavery.

But for every giant anthem there's a batch of slow tunneling tracks that force the rush-hour mentality to bead away — even if they're impossible to appreciate pitted against industrial aggressors. Greg Ashley's music doesn't work wedged between BART stops. It won't capture your imagination penciled into a coffee break. It demands your full attention.

Good listeners clock serious time with Ashley's songs. It's not that he makes highfalutin extractions you need a degree in symphonies to translate. The Oakland artist's solo records — like Medicine Fuck Dream and the new Painted Garden — are just really delicate in their intricacies, like flea market finds that you wrap in tissue before taking home. The songs sound artfully weathered, edges yellowed the minute they hit headphones. But Ashley's music also ages in reverse, antique in its methodology but young and almost playful at the core. Cue the giggling, tickled girl opening Medicine Fuck Dream, or Ashley's techniques of embracing mishaps — a cough in this song, a stuttered track shift on that one — while his lyrics take artificiality to task, all marks of a musician short on years and long in soul.

"Greg Ashley is a true psychedelic visionary, maybe the greatest of his generation," Adam Shore of Vice Records writes in an e-mail. "His music is not retro and it doesn't pay homage to music of the past. It lives in this timeless place in a space of his own." Shore doesn't have a professional connection to Ashley — who records for local label Birdman Records — but he's a big fan nonetheless, as are members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Trail of Dead, and Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, according to Birdman owner Dave Katznelson. Katznelson adds of Ashley, "He has a way of changing the molecules in the air when he plays, something that others have done before but is still a rare occurrence. He is not only a great artist, but a great artist playing through a world of fuzz and beauty that I love."

Although his fans have their hopes, Ashley, aged 26 and a chain Camel Lights smoker, isn't poised to become famous anytime soon. His full band, psych rock outfit Gris Gris, was hand-picked to open for Karen O and company — two shows in Los Angeles last year — but that's probably his highest claim to fame in a decade of songwriting. Still, his grip on fans only firms with time. And with the release of Painted Garden, Ashley proves that in an era of greedy, speedy sonic consumption, his slow-building albums offer a rewarding transcendence outta this metropolis.

To get to the ex-Texan's Oakland studios, you walk past the boxing gloves hanging from a tree branch and take a right at the kitchen appliances nestled into the weeds. Go down the hallway of a two-bedroom apartment and dead-end at his temporary setup (noise complaints from the neighbors have left his renting situation slightly precarious). Although this is technically Ashley's bedroom, these quarters — the size of a modest Public Storage unit — are as overtaken by recording tools as his yard is with grass. Chords strangle a ceiling fan, stacks of album masters (for his solo work and with the Gris Gris and the Mirrors, as well as for the artists he's recorded — Brian Glaze, Killer's Kiss, Battleship) are welded into a closet shelf. Elsewhere, analog artifacts jostle for space with stacks of blank CDs, and a Story & Clark piano stands burdened with random loads of technical knickknacks.

The Queer Eye contingent would have a field day with this bachelor pad. Ashley's aesthetic is firmly set in "aftermath" mode, the only sign that he uses these digs beyond the creation and recording of music being a browbeaten couch/bed of the sort that usually dies on curbsides, its olive pillows covered in white sheets. But you don't come to Greg Ashley's place for the feng shui, you come by to record your garage band, you pop in to offer help with that piano melody, you spend a weekend drinking beers and end up weaving into the fabric of his Nuggets sensibilities. Or, in the case of Ashley's forthcoming producing project, you're part of a Birdman comp of local "people who have mellower solo stuff," he says. "Each [artist] comes over for a day and we hang out and record a song together."

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