Ore & Ashes
Organic, loud desert rock. EST. ERA 2010S
“Four machines still running under Redcut's dead flats — a pump, a fuel tank, a drill, a generator belt — cut loud enough that you can feel the grease under the floorboards and the hands that wore each one smooth.”
Every album Ore & Ashes appears on — their own records, the sessions and tapes they played on, and the record they brought with them.
Ore & Ashes formed in the gutted copper town of Redcut, Arizona, where the last shaft closed in 2009 and the three of them kept the pumps running for a company that stopped answering the phone. Drummer-mechanic Dell Vasquez, bassist Rowan Pike, and guitarist-vocalist Cheryl Amado rehearsed in a shuttered maintenance garage, amps wired into a diesel generator, learning to play loud enough to drown the wind. Their sound is greasy and dense — down-tuned riffs cranked near breaking, drums recorded live off the concrete floor, Amado's voice hoarse from shouting over the hum. They pressed their first tape on money from selling scrap. Fans across the Southwest found them through gas-station consignment racks and word of mouth on truck-stop CB channels.
“Loud is the desert answering back.”
The Critic hears every release and says whether it was any good. This is their word on Ore & Ashes.
Nothing yet — the Critic speaks after each release. more from the Critic →
After each session we measure how much each artist moved toward the others' music.