Description
Ashtray Navigations is an English experimental music group centred upon Phil Todd and active since 1991. Colloquially referred to as “Ash Nav”, the group operates out of Todd’s home in Stoke-on-Trent, from which he also ran the record labels Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers and, subsequently, Memoirs of an Aesthete. The project has also released music through labels such as Siltbreeze, Jewelled Antler, American Tapes, Fargone Records, Menlo Park, E.F. Tapes and Freedom From.
Whilst the music evades easy categorisation due to variations in sound, approach and personnel, it often incorporates extended droning and lengthy guitar pieces. James Blackshaw described the Ashtray Navigations sound as “sub-aquatic synth bubble, busted-up cassette-tape hiss and distorted electric guitar hover that sounds like a mythical god banished from the realm of light and trying desperately to clamber his/her way out of a dark bottomless void where time itself stands still.” The Wire’s David Keenan has described Phil Todd/Ashtray Navigations as “a trashcan antidote to LaMonte Young.”
