Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

Your mid-twenties can be tough, though thankfully, a global sector of music exists to pander that exact sentiment. It's called indie. Up there with the heavyweights of the movement is Casiotone For The Painfully Alone – a circus of bedroom synths and sordid stories detailing everyday situations that are painfully relatable. The man behind CFTPA is Owen Ashworth: an American muso who writes about ordinary people in extreme emotional circumstances. Think of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone as a montage of your life's most wrenching moments, in musical form.

"I love writing about really vulnerable stuff from a very personal place, and things that are uncomfortable in an almost embarrassing kind of way," says Ashworth. "I want to be affected by music and I don't trust happy music in the same way. It's a rare occasion when a really happy, upbeat song actually feels relatable or genuine."

Contrastingly, the tone of Ashworth's music is consistently warm. Record upon record, he builds and breaks characters in a sea of beeps and washed out synths. Low-fi drums cruise Casiotone melodies as Ashwood mumbles to his ramshackle score. "I think the music of mine that I've enjoyed the most is the stuff that's come about unconsciously when I've been trying to think of another part to accompany a melody," Ashworth notes. "My music shouldn't feel laboured over. Maybe the stuff I do labour over is just as good, but it doesn't feel as magical to me, because I know exactly where it came from."

His latest record, Vs. Children sees Ashworth tackle another round of broken hearts, missed opportunities and tales of the achingly mundane. "I think this album comes from a place of change. A lot of my songs are geographically based, and having moved to Chicago from San Francisco, I've been finding my own feet and my identity all over again. Politically and socially it's a very different climate here. It's been a challenge to re-establish myself and it feels like a milder form of culture clash than moving to another country, but it definitely feels like a different life."

What's relatable about Ashworth is his obvious humanness. Drawing lyrically on personal experiences and those of friends and family, each song tells a story you've encountered on one level or another on the darker side of the emotional spectrum. There's an awkward honesty to his lyrical style that indulges your hang-ups, and Ashworth is neither embarrassed nor reluctant to express the feelings we're outwardly encouraged to ignore. "My favourite songs have always been the sad ones. There's something really satisfying about a terribly depressing song." Brooke Salisbury

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