Ashtray Navigations
Photo:Melanie Delaney
The ashtray navigations thing was started in January 1991 by Phil Todd in
Stoke On Trent, England, a region then and now at the very heart of the
nation's exciting toilet manufacturing industry. Upon acquisition of a
motherlode of broken instruments and noisy toys, Todd (who also ran the
Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers record label and a host of other activities
best not got into here etc.) decided to fuse two of his favourite musical
genres - sixties psychedelic rock and minimal power electronics, into a
junkyard aesthetic focused around an acute misinterpretation of Hindu
Classical Music common to many teenage guitar-lashers of his deluded
generation.
As you can imagine, a whole avalance of cassettes, vinyl and CD releases
were produced and eventually international labels such as Siltbreeze,
American Tapes, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Spirit Of Orr, U-Sound etc etc
joined in the fun, spurting huge splattery arcs of Ashtray Navigations
produce across all four corners of the globe, even though a globe is of
course spherical and has no corners as such. Still, this has not stopped us
as yet.
