Slip Inside This House

Musicians request Ashley's assistance for various reasons. (Birdman solo artist Brian Glaze quips, "I like the fact that he smokes more than I do in the studio, and doesn't mind recording drum tracks on Christmas morning in a studio apartment.") But to the outsider, it's Ashley's spirit of pocket-change invention that cements his mystique. On 2003's Medicine Fuck Dream, he hit lollipops against half-empty bottles of Mad Dog for the percussion on a creaky cover of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway." On Painted Garden, out this week, Ashley's anorexic checking account forced more creative forays. To wit: "Medication #5" needed a cello, but all Ashley had on hand was a violin player. After taking a violin bow to his bass, he recorded the violinist at a low speed while she played her part four times as fast. "When the violin is slowed down, it goes down eight octaves and sounds like a cello," Ashley explains. In other words, it gives off a heavy melancholy befitting a song about rotting sexuality. Elsewhere, bent saw melodies "remind me of an opera singer," Ashley says; "it's high and kinda spooky," while clarinet skronk morphs into guitar feedback. "That's what I really love about doing this shit, you can really geek out," he says. "Like the song with a gong on it — there's no way I could afford a real gong, so I bought a shitty $5 one and recorded it at high speed again and then slowed it down so it sounds like a low gong." What would Ashley do with the purse strings for a real gong, an actual cello, a live opera singer? He laughs and answers, "Then I wouldn't have anything to figure out."

The soft focus approach is integral to Ashley's work, whether it's embedded in his narratives or infused into genres (folk, free jazz, garage, Latino and Middle Eastern music, among others) that move through one another like dreams. Painted Garden is less the pillowy whispers of Medicine and more the rocky psych ride given in Gris Gris records, with multiple directional shifts. The new disc flirts with homemade Tropicalia on "Sailing With Bobby," featuring chirping birds and the downy coo of a female singer, incorporated due to Ashley's affection for Brazilians Os Mutantes and the loungy Martin Denny. "Fisher King" also maintains an island vibe, albeit with arsenic spiking cocktail beats; lyrics tell of "gettin' high on a balcony hangin' from a string/ pick up your spoon, cook up your breakfast sad fisher king," against clattering percussion that mimics utensils cracking glass. Shifting moods again, "Pretty Belladonna" performs a tear-blurred waltz to a crush already spoken for.

The songs reveal his disappointments with artifice or romantic archenemies — sex bludgeoned by cheap bargaining, a foe acting "like a dollar bill that's waitin' for the powder," landscapes pocked with whores who douse their faces in garish hues. But Ashley's songs are single-edged swords, offering tender images of, say, the desire to make a girl blush, earnestness struggling up from within cynicism's hard crevices.

Ashley's music doesn't offer emotions that can be easily text messaged. He holds old-fashioned beliefs about what can't be bought — whether the subject concerns quick rendezvous or recording studios. As Birdman's Katznelson says in semi-seriousness, "[Ashley] is a total romantic, and his records are fantastic to have sex to." And, well, regardless of whether you use Painted Garden to compliment a set of satin sheets, Ashley's Wonderland charm places a warm halo between you and the rest of the hustle. It's a cozy place to settle — even with the painted ladies lurking for dollar-bill boys around the corner.