5 out of 5

Produced by: Stuart Arnot and Susan Fitzpatrick (recorded by)

Label: VHF

The fuzz… the sweet, sweet fuzz…

Ashtray Navigations are, and always have been, Phil Todd, guitar psychedelia wielder en masse, flinging limited CD-R recordings about for 21 years or so, often accompanied by other outre artists doing their thing.  On A Shimmering Replica, that means Melanie O’Dubshlaine, whom we’ll assume added a lot of the lovely electronic blitzes flitzing about the thing.  Re-released on VHF (post a CD-R release) as “an LP with bonus CD,” the album, total, runs to just about 100 minutes, with the shortest song (out of 10 – 4 on vinyl, 6 on CD, all provided digitally as well because the world loves us) about six minutes long.  “Ach,” you say, in an oddly affected Scottish accent, “another one of these meandering VHF releases.”  Well, first off, if you’re aware of VHF I’m not sure why you’re upset by that, but secondly, this is one of the most accessible and engaging of this type of genre music to which I’ve been exposed.  While there are elements here that certainly make the album sound at home on the label – when the noise is at its peak, it’s a shoe-in for Matthew Bower Sunroof!-esque madness, and the CD’s more reliance on ambience to for any given song’s tone is reminiscent of Pelt – Todd leads the charge at all times with a very focused and patient sense of riffage, that will only freak out into acid-land once the plodding beat – an electronic-sounding thump – has been established.  The burbles and bleeps are the icing on this recipe, flavoring the recording so it doesn’t just come across as drone.  Toward the middle of the album, the sound opens up a bit to be guided by the non-guitar work, but the spell has been efficiently cast by this point.

Most of VHF definitely comes with a learning curve.  Yes, Ashtray Navigations requires a tolerance for slow-burn noise, but it’s ear grabbing with its steady guitar work in a way that some of the group’s now-labelmates forego in favor of ear-shredding.  But this certainly doesn’t make it a simplistic or basic set of compositions.  While recorded live and by, amazingly, only two people, A Shimmering Replica is an incredibly rich, moving and / or trancelike experience, fully re-listenable even at its 100-minute runtime.