Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone is the solo project of American musician Owen Ashworth, working from Chicago and later San Francisco. From the late 1990s through to 2010, he released a series of lo-fi, intimately autobiographical albums built from cheap Casio keyboards, drum machines, and understated vocals. Records including Answering Machine Music (2000), Tomahawk Dynamite (2003), and Vs. Children (2009) documented small, specific scenes of loneliness and urban life with deadpan emotional precision. He subsequently began recording as Advance Base, continuing a similar practice of minimal confessional songwriting.