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Advance Base main man Owen Ashworth creates tender character portraits of people in moments of struggle. Advance Base’s Color Club concert this week is also a release party for the project’s fourth studio album, Horrible Occurrences, released earlier this month on Run for Cover. As Reader contributor Ed Blair notes in their preview of the show, the new record is cloaked in the darkness that haunts the fictional town of Richmond. Ashworth landed on the concept while writing album opener “The Year I Lived in Richmond,” in which a woman fends off a home intruder with a knife.
“I didn’t want to put these stories in a specific place, ’cause it was meant to be a pretty dark record,” Ashworth says. “I had been thinking a little bit about The Simpsons and Springfield, and also Haddonfield, where the Halloween franchise takes place, and how that was a made-up Illinois town.” Ashworth named the woman in “The Year I Lived in Richmond” after Debra Hill, cowriter of the 1978 Halloween, in homage to the place-setting inspiration for Horrible Occurrences—Hill grew up partly in the real town of Haddonfield, New Jersey. Ashworth also drew inspiration from Strange Behavior, a 1981 horror movie made in New Zealand but set in the real Illinois town of Galesburg.
“I came to realize, while putting this record together, that I’m imagining all of my albums as horror-movie locations,” Ashworth says. “It’s just this small cast of characters in these traumatic situations, but I made it more literal on this record than usual.” He worked on the album over the past five years, and its cursed aura gave him some trouble. “I was having a really challenging time working through the stories and not sure if I wanted to commit to making such a dark record,” he says. “I kept scrapping it and trying to write different kinds of songs, but some of these songs stuck with me. I thought I had to push through it and get it done, because I didn’t think I was able to commit to another project until I got this one out of my system.”
Ashworth kept the material on Horrible Occurrences close to his chest too. “I have a little paranoia about losing a lot of momentum if I talk about stuff too much while it’s in progress,” he says. He got feedback during the process from just a couple of friends: Nicholas Krgovich and Karima Walker, both musicians with releases on Ashworth’s label, Orindal Records. Walker also toured with Ashworth over the summer. “I was really stripping back a lot of the new songs to match the feel of her set,” he says. “She ended up really guiding the way the record sounded, from her music and her friendship.”
The cover of the new Advance Base album is a painting by Owen Ashworth’s great-grandfather George L. Berg.
For the cover of Horrible Occurrences, Ashworth used a painting of a wooded path that he says has a touch of the Richmond darkness. He’s owned it for years, and it hangs in his dining room, where he can look at it all the time. It’s the work of George L. Berg, one of his maternal great-grandfathers.
“He was an itinerant painter who went around the country, painting landscapes and selling them or gifting them along the way,” Ashworth says. “I’ve always felt the connection between his artistic pursuits and what I do for a living. I like the idea of honoring him with a record cover.”
When Ashworth headlines Color Club for his annual Christmas concert on Friday, December 20, he’ll mix material from Horrible Occurrences into his usual holiday fare. Karima Walker opens.
On Saturday, December 21, Bridgeport Records and the Ramova Theatre present a night of dance music in the Ramova Loft. The two artists are Vick Lavender, who co-owns Bridgeport Records, and Chicago house veteran Rahaan, who recently released The Ones, an ambitious, heartfelt album stuffed with symphonic disco flourishes and modern-funk arrangements. The “Bridgeport Sessions” night starts at 9 PM.
Rahaan’s September release The Ones is available as a double LP.
On Friday, December 20, experimental Chicago rock band TV Buddha release the EP 10,000 Buddhas. Eli Schmitt, a workhorse of the local all-ages scene, launched the band last year with Fallen Log talent buyer Cole “Johnson Rockstar” Hunt. They issued their debut full-length, 2023’s Simple Bodies, shortly before Hunt graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, and he’s since relocated here. “When Cole moved to Chicago, it changed the nature of the whole band,” Schmitt says. “Our first record was this momentary encounter, but with 10,000 Buddhas we really got to sit with the songs and live in them.”
Since the release of Simple Bodies, 15 other musicians have played in TV Buddha at one point or another, helping Schmitt and Hunt flesh out their material. TV Buddha’s June live recording, June 9 [Alive], includes contributions from Amaya Peña, all three members of Lifeguard, and Eli Winter. Each of those 15 musicians has left fingerprints on 10,000 Buddhas, even though only four guests appear on the recordings.
TV Buddha released this live recording in June 2024.
“Since the musicians playing with us live are constantly in flux, we’ve had to teach the parts to so many different people while also absorbing each unique approach to those parts that each person brings,” Hunt says. “Some of the things that our friends came up with became inextricable elements of the songs and are captured here in the recordings, although those people may not be performing with us recently.”
Working with Lifeguard and Sharp Pins front man Kai Slater as their engineer, TV Buddha recorded 10,000 Buddhas in a couple days. The soaring, sprawling EP crescendos into its closing track, “Baby, Woah!” Hunt describes the song as “trying to figure out how Phil Spector or Brian Wilson would have produced a Spacemen 3 track if they had fallen in love with Mahayana Buddhism rather than American blues.”
The guest musicians on 10,000 Buddhas include Lifeguard members Asher Case and Kai Slater.
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