Nature Reversed by Ashley Reaks

Nature Reversed is a stark, hallucinatory journey through the Yorkshire Dales and the inherited wounds of a father–son lineage. Mixing messed-up jazz fragments with rural, almost medieval folk textures, the album follows a narrator who must invert his own nature to survive the authoritarian “Old King” and then claw his way back to himself through wildness, shame, desire, and the raw, cyclical violence of the natural world.

Birds, wombs, cripple holes, beasts, and winter landscapes become psychic symbols of entrapment and escape, while grief and rebirth blur into one continuous ritual. Ultimately, the album traces a path from repression toward a fierce and fragile freedom, discovering that renewal comes not from rejecting one’s origins but from breaking them open and letting the feral, uncontrollable life beneath them surge through.

Nature Reversed draws on a collision of disparate worlds — the fractured jazz-punk energy of Rip Rig + Panic and the experimental improvisation of Soft Machine, the intimate absurdity of Ivor Cutler and the raw surrealism of Captain Beefheart, layered with Dadaist cut-ups, collage, and Beat poetry. Visual and literary influences — Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Gee Vaucher, William Burroughs, John Clare, and James Hillman — provide a psychic and ecological lens, while pioneering musicians — Robert Wyatt, Talk Talk, PJ Harvey, Fela Kuti, early Genesis, Bowie’s Blackstar, and The Pop Group — inspire its daring rhythmic and tonal structures. Even Be-Bop improvisation, Spike Milligan’s absurdity, and Steve Reich’s minimalism echo throughout the album, shaping its architecture of chaos and order.

Genre-hopping musician, collagist, writer and Dada poet.

"A punk Frank Zappa' - Turn Up The Volume (USA)

"an incomparable talent and a true original, a man who often borders on genius" - Louder Than War (UK)

ashleyreaks.com
ashleyreaks.bigcartel.com
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