The Light Fantastic

Eigengrau, according to Jonny Ashe, is the colour we see when we close our eyes.

Although, perhaps, calling it a colour overstates things: Eigengrau isn’t something you can pick up in a tin in a hardware shop. The wash of dark greys and odd lights is a nebulous thing – subtle, fleeting, and ultimately indefinable.
Jonny’s remarkable debut album is less a collection of songs, than a series of muted, fragmentary, atmospheres. You could call it electronica, or ambient, or even modernist folk – but really it defies categorisation.
It’s titled Eigengrau.
Of course it is.
“It’s what we’re supposed to see,” says the erstwhile Tracer AMC guitarist. “But people perceive different things. And the way you focus your concentration has a big impact. Which is similar to music, I suppose. Depending on the way you listen at any particular moment, and probably on your preconceptions about what you’re listening to, you’ll take different things from it.”
If Eigengrau is a difficult record to sum up, you’ll hear no apologies coming from Jonny. As he talks about its long gestation and intuitive methodology, it’s clear he holds little truck with the wolfish careerism and flat-pack rhetoric of most modern musicians.
“The approach varied a little,” he reveals, “but for at least half of the songs I took the signal from a guitar and split it into two or three, with each taking its own route through a different string of effects – mostly delays, or long decaying loops – into different amps. So as I was playing, I’d hear the sounds I’d made a while back slithering back at me at different times, from different directions, slightly degraded. Which is a pretty exciting sensation – obviously very different to playing in a band, but it gives a sense of being strongly connected with some bigger system, and one that felt unpredictable and out of control.”
The fragments on the record were put together over a four year period. While Jonny claims he hadn’t imagined them ever coalescing into an of-a-piece album, once he stepped back to look at the work he’d done, it seemed logical to gather them together.
“I actually had ideas for an entirely different record,” he explains. “I had a bunch of ideas that were much more song-based, and I wanted to work on those and call them an album. But I had these other little pieces that weren’t in keeping with the newer ideas, and were niggling at me because they felt finished and I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t want to just discard them. So I thought of putting them together, and it was immediately obvious that it was the right thing to do. It feels like a whole to me – it flows together.”
It’s an abstract, subtle listen. Given that, and the low-key way it’s been released, there’s every chance Eigengrau will get lost in the media blizzard. Not that Jonny seems bothered.
“It isn’t a worry, no,” he smiles, “because it wasn’t part of the thinking behind it – I didn’t set out to make an impact with it. No one else has any stake in it, so there’s no pressure, and my ideas really weren’t much bigger than giving copies to a few friends and then letting it slide out into the world in its own way. So it’s more amazement and delight anytime I’ve heard that someone has shared it with someone else, and that they’ve listened to it and gotten something from it. I’ve never been very comfortable even in a band saying “hey, listen to my record!”, so doing that kind of thing seems even more awkward when it’s only me!"
With this record, and the Tracer stuff (more of which is due early next year) – Jonny’s never going to challenge any X-Factor winners in the Xmas charts. You have to wonder if the lad has ever been tempted to cross-over.
“I know my limitations,” he laughs, “and I think I’d have an inability to even if I wanted to! I like pop songs – Alex and I both played in Kidd Dynamo, and I played with Barry Peak from Backwater and Torgas Valley Reds for a while. Both Colin (Campbell) and Barry write great songs, and I loved playing with them. But I can’t do it – I don’t seem able to come up with catchy hooks, and although I’ve occasionally written songs with singing I don’t think I’ve managed to write an actual chorus.”
For which, we should all be a little bit grateful.

See jonnyashe.bandcamp.com/album/eigengrau