Ashley Reaks Art And Music

‘Giving Your Heart To Mother’ - A4 Collage ✂️

‘Portrait Of A Prisoner’ - A4 Collage ✂️

‘An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Henri Matisse

My 2021 collage portrait of Rishi Sunak ✂️

‘Self-Portrait’ - Collage 30 x 30 cm ✂️

‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’.

Antonio Gramsci

‘Self-Portrait’ - A3 Collage ✂️

‘When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was... an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted’.

Guillermo del Toro

‘Silent Partner’ - A3 Collage ✂️

‘Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos’

Stephen Sondheim

‘Street Gang’ - A4 Collage ✂️

On 'This Is England,' everyone is mates. The nice thing is that when you watch us, you're watching a gang. They're young, and they're adventurous. There's a real closeness there.

Joe Gilgun

2018’s ‘The Earth Swan Sings Again’ is the lost child within my album discography. Various boring life events meant it never got the attention it deserved at the time and it entered the world virtually unnoticed. I listened to it for the first time in ages last night on my midnight hobble round the neighbouring streets and loved every moment 🖤

I wrote it in a 3 or 4 day frenzy, cobbled together from Beefheartian scraps of unconnected musical riffs, some leftover post-punk bass lines, full jazz drum tracks played separately and recorded by the reclusive ‘Oily’ Mike, and fragments of sometimes ‘cut-up’ lyrics concerning nature and psychogeography (whatever that is), which I was reading voraciously at the time. I originally wrote the vocals for long-term collaborator Maria Jardardottir to sing but she relocated back to Norway, so instead of transposing them to a more suitable key for me, I sang all her parts in a faux-Jon Anderson style, which hopefully only added to the album’s sense of otherness 🖤

‘The Earth Swan Sings Again’ was recorded, mixed and produced by Dan Mizen, the sublime saxes were played by Joel Purnell, gorgeous guitars by Nick Dunne, whilst I took care of the vocals, bass, keys and whatever guitar parts my limited technique could manage. Maria’s voice does appear as an improvised solo on ‘The Embers Of Tomorrow’, shamelessly stolen from another recording session and transplanted into the new one 🖤

‘The Earth Swan Sings Again’ (and 13 other albums) is available free or PWYW from ashleyreaks.bandcamp.com 🖤

https://youtu.be/cDzeuO5QVi0?si=wstxqVpOLC3DeapU

Ashley Reaks - Inside Her Shimmering Agony 'Inside Her Shimmering Agony' from 2018 album 'The Earth Swan Sings Again' available to download at https://ashleyreaks.bandcamp.com/

‘Overwhelmed’ - Collage 20 x 20 cm ✂️

‘One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves’

Rollo May

Thanks to Prog Censor for their review of my 2023 album ‘Winter Crawls’ available at ashleyreaks,bandcamp.com 🙏🖤

Ashley Reaks (Ashley Reaks Art And Music)
Winter Crawls
rock progressif éclectique – 46:16 – Royaume-Uni 2023
Pour Ashley Reaks, le déclic a eu lieu à l’âge de 11 ans, lorsqu’il a entendu les punks new-yorkais «The Ramones». Leurs chansons sur les cinglés et les marginaux issus de familles dysfonctionnelles lui ont donné un espace où s’inscrire.
Carrière musicale pour le moins éclectique, entre bassiste de studio et (entre autres) tournées mondiales avec Francis Dunnery, le leader d'It Bites.
Notre musicien qui se présente comme un survivant de maltraitance infantile propose une musique naviguant entre punk et rock progressif. Les thèmes du traumatisme, de l'impuissance, de la protestation, de la maladie mentale, de la violence, de l'humiliation, de l'abandon, de la honte et de la claustrophobie apparaissent régulièrement dans son travail musical mais aussi plastique.
8 titres constituent « Winter Crawls », son 13e album. L’écriture et l’enregistrement ont commencé en 2018, mais ont été interrompus et retardés à plusieurs reprises par un divorce, un déménagement, la pandémie de Covid-19 et une série de problèmes de santé chroniques.
Les chansons ne sont pas toujours constituées de couplets et de refrains identifiables. Rythmiquement, les arrangements sont très irréguliers et changeants. Les parties de guitare et de clavier ne sont généralement pas constituées d'accords pour soutenir le chant (masculin et féminin), mais d'arpèges et de contre-mélodies.
À noter: le travail fabuleux de Rob Hirons aux fûts et les saillies des saxophones de Joel Purnell.
«Winter Crawls» défie toute catégorisation (il y a du Devin Townsend, du Wishbone Ash et du Frank Zappa), mais le style progressif est omniprésent et constitue le noyau de base à partir duquel l’artiste converse avec des musiciens, des philosophes et des entités spirituelles qui l’ont marqué, des Stranglers, Yes et Genesis (de l'époque de Peter Gabriel), à Francis Bacon et Ivor Cutler.
Publius Gallia
Bandcamp: https://ashleyreaks.bandcamp.com/album/winter-crawls

‘Self-Portrait’ - A4 Collage ✂️🖤

‘The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude’….

Aldous Huxley

‘Save The Babies’ - A4 Collage ✂️

‘Body Memories’ - Collage 30 x 42 cm ✂️

‘Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home’’

Nikki Rowe

‘A Child Is Born’ - A4 Collage ✂️

‘Actually I don't remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs’.

Jim Morrison

‘Midnight Mass’ - Collage 25 x 30 cm ✂️

‘I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses’.

Friedrich Nietzsche,

‘Self-Portrait’ - A3 Collage ✂️

‘Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars’.

Khalil Gibran

Excellent review of my 2023 ‘Winter Crawls’ album by Petr Prochazka for Czech avant-cultural magazine UNI (in Czech language but Google translated below). ‘Winter Crawls’ and 13 other albums are available at ashleyreaks.bandcamp.com 🖤

Please, this is an album totally packed with music! A musician's hearing no doubt makes the spirit squint its ears with glee. The thirteenth album of the English musician and more or less visual artist is truly a revelation that even the unbeliever will roll his eyes at. As a good true Caribbean rum without a minimum five-year aging-breathing period in oak barrels, experienced drinkers cannot avoid these drinks and release them for consumption, that is how many years Winter Crawls has matured. The period of covid mortality and the frequent reference to those two years of terrible paralysis are surely trampling and annoying us all. But it belongs here. And in fact, it should be remembered in any sense. We're all going to have to deal with this for a while.

The genesis of writing Reaks's stuff for this record goes back to the clean, normal pre-covid era in the beautiful, problem-free year of 2018. Then interrupted and interrupted again with a hint of his personal and health troubles. The imprint of those five years is clearly visible after the first listen. A cycled story. The Murmur of Things Divine's opening vault of pure song-singing beauty, right before the peak encapsulated by Joel Purnell's sax solo. Then a slightly eerie, polyrhythmically (excellent drummer Rob Hirons) complex title thing with intermingling harmonic versions/keyboard themes, saxophones, guitars, vocals and other voices.

Speaking of vocals! This is the masterful hallmark of Ashley's songs, comparable perhaps only to the choruses of the former CSN&Y. Here they function as a coherent instrument rather than complementing the main singing line. Either in dynamizing the text, or as its dramatic opponent. Texts are an important element here, very similar to Reaks' collages. As well as rhythmically very erratic arrangements full of unexpected accents and tempo changes. Bizarre edited dada images outside of any established notions of conventional songwriting. Guitars (genius Nick Dunne), bass and keyboard parts (Reaks) mostly consist not of chords to support the vocals, but of arpeggios and countermelodies. An album matured like wine, like great rum.

https://www.magazinuni.cz/hudba/ashley-reaks-winter-crawls/

Ashley Reaks - Winter Crawls - kulturní magazín Uni Tohle je, prosím pěkně, hudbou totálně narvané album! Muzikantský sluch duch bezpochyby radostně zastřihá ušima. Třináctá deska anglického muzikanta a víceméně výtvarníka-vizuálního umělce je vpravdě…

‘Self-Portrait’ - A4 Collage ✂️

‘I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men’

H.P. Lovecraft

"Self-Portrait’ - A3 Collage ✂️

“… madness,
in a higher sense,
is the beginning
of all wisdom."

~ Hermann Hesse

‘Locked In Syndrome’ A4 Collage ✂️

‘The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!’

Edith Wharton

‘Me And My Shadow’ - A4 Collage ✂️

I think this is a good review of my 2023 album ‘Winter Crawls’ as the reviewer marked it 4 out of 5. I assume he’s a drummer though as he takes issue not only with Rob Hirons’s busy but superb drumming but also how loud the drums are in the mix! It reminds me of a review I had of my 2008 album ‘Melancholia’ where the reviewer raved about it, called me a genius with a wild and fearless imagination and that I had a skill for mixing disparate parts into a new whole but then marked it as 1 out of 10 as (God forbid) I’d acted like a fully paid up Satanist by reciting one of my cut-up dadaist anti-poems on one track, to which he sniffily remarked, ‘You just cannot start sentences and abandon them halfway through!’ Wanna bet?😂

I found out later that, perhaps unsurprisingly, he was a poet who’d taken great offence at my supposed disrespect for his particular artistic love of words, though he didn’t seem to mind me scavenging and pilfering scraps from other art forms and mixing them all together into a great creative turd 💩 Fu*king art snobs! 😂

This review is generally fair though and he again mentions Van Der Graaf Generator as a likeness so I really must give them more of a listen. He also mentions Soft Machine, Cardiacs and XTC, three excellent English bands so I’ll accept the compliment and move on 🙏 ➡️

Winter Crawls is available at ashleyreaks.bandcamp.com 🖤

http://www.progressor.net/review/ashley_reaks_2023.html

Short Reviews [Ashley Reaks - 2023 - "Winter Crawls"] - ProgressoR Detailed review

‘Self-Portrait At Home’ - Collage 25 x 25 cm ✂️

“Some people like neat suburbs. I always am attracted to the rundown and the old and the offbeat.”

― William S. Burroughs

‘Father And Son Time’ - A4 Collage ✂️

‘We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it’

Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child

‘Mother And Child’ - A4 Collage ✂️

Original handmade collages available at www. ashleyreaks.bigcartel.com 🖤

‘Self-Portrait’ - A3 Collage ✂️

‘I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion’

Yohji Yamamoto

‘Portrait Of My Mum And Dad @ 1976’ - Collage 20 x 20 cm ✂️

‘Another thing I learned in therapy?" Angie said. "The kids in dysfunctional families who act out and rebel are the ones who are the healthiest mentally. They're the ones who see that something's wrong. That's why they act out, because they see the house is burning down, and they're screaming for help. That was you’

Meg Shaffer

‘Taken Hostage’ - Collage 20 x 20 cm ✂️

‘An abductor is reliant on your silence’

Steven Magee

‘Self-Portrait’ - A4 Collage ✂️

‘When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design’

Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art