Review | Asher White – 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living

Label: Joyful Noise Recordings

By Ed Thurlow

I’m crouched at the altar of my ten-year-old Lenovo laptop, the kind with fan noise that creeps to a screaming climax, the kind that burns your thighs. It wheezes like a workhorse, but it’s the only portal I’ve got to Asher White’s album ‘8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living’: a humorous and self-destructive twist on a self-help book title.

This project marks Asher’s 16th album and her first with label Joyful Noise – the home of noise-punk legends Deerhoof – a band she went on to share a stage with, which is, in my opinion, about as close to a knighthood as the rock world allows.

My laptop’s cranked to the max. It’s got the kind of built-in speakers that claim to be Bang & Olufsen design. Still, they turn any kick to cardboard, which is, I suspect, exactly how Asher White’s album should be enjoyed – her strange Providence hermitage bleeding through the paper membranes of my computer. Like my Lenovo, screaming toward collapse, White’s record makes beauty out of broken machinery and rough edges. 

Upon first listen, it is apparent to me that ‘8 Tips…‘ is intended to be a breathing document of Asher’s experience: living through her final years in Providence, before moving to New York. It’s been left intentionally unpolished, a summation of found objects, moments in time, a process of collecting and assembling. She leans on chaos in principle to prove that what’s happening is immediate and human.

‘Beers With My Name On Them‘ embodies this best, through frequent genre switches: impatient pop vocal lines which break into jazz-on-speed drumming, before moments that echo Xiu Xiu’s skewed intensity. It’s silly, light-hearted, and constantly contradicting itself. The song throws you everywhere at once: making art from catastrophe and finding joy in the fragments left behind.

‘8 Tips…’ seems to be a Trojan horse – there’s a constant onslaught of quirks and chaos (most obvious in a track like ‘Beers With My Name On Them‘), but I believe it’s smuggling something heavier. The album hides behind the satire of her music in constant flux, and in this way mirrors a generational trope. A generation of zoomers trained to dress sincerity in absurdity. Whether this is a strength or a shortcoming, it is undeniably relatable and holds a mirror to the new wave of creatives raised on irony and memes.

For songs such as ‘Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab’, a noise rock, almost-free-jazz piece with theatrical rises and crashes, my Lenovo’s brittle speakers feel right. Asher wrote this album in a plague year with avatars of disillusioned middle-aged women swimming through a slow-mo apocalypse on her mind. The record lurches from industrial techno to Vangelis-type synths over bossa nova guitar; she’s sonically omnivorous, and happy to chew up and spit out any genre that happens to pinball down her ear canal.

In an ethereal wash, ‘Voice Memo‘ drifts in with looping brightness, with reverbed vocals that hover over wet, submerged guitars. It’s an aquatic scape: airy passages that feel like broken hymns, latent recollections of tender moments.

Asher’s a compulsive collector and restless creative moving between music, writing, sculpture, and painting. “It’s forever collage, forever assemblage,” she says. “To me, it has more to do with J Dilla, L.A beat, and musique concrete than pop songwriting.” ‘Like Another Planet Instrumental‘ arrives as a euphoric interlude, carried by soaring synths, and around the 1 minute 35 second mark, a loose, Dilla-inspired drum break briefly percolates with grit and charm, only to be overhauled with brittle, high-pitched snares that distract more than they enhance. I can’t help wanting more Dilla. 

And yet, somewhere after maximalist chaos and satire, she’ll give you ‘Falls‘, an exception to the rule, where she hovers on nothing but thin air, a minimalist composition emphasising silence – something like post-rock. Reductionism with pregnant space. Mark Hollis, frontman and key creative force behind the band Talk Talk, said, “Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note. And don’t play one note unless you’ve got reason to play it.” On ‘Falls‘, White does just that, stripping away the excess assemblage until all that’s left is the trembling essence of her sound, and in doing so, she proves Hollis right: sometimes catastrophe is best told in a single, quivering note.