Ed Askew, the singer-songwriter and visual artist whose mesmerizing acid-folk records were unearthed by successive crate diggers and became a cult relic, died of natural causes on January 4th. Tin Angel Records shared the news on Instagram, as did Askew’s friend and collaborator Jay. Plack confirmed this in an email to Pitchfork. Mr. Askew was 84 years old.
Born in Stamford, Conn., in 1940, Askew studied piano as a teenager before taking up guitar. He moved to New Haven to study painting at Yale University, where he became fascinated with Paul Cézanne and the modernists. “The issue of innovation has never interested me personally, because I believe it can cause people to stop painting,” he told The Believer in 2012. In between his jobs as an art teacher and house painter, he formed a band called Gandalf and the Motorpickle.
In the late 1960s, Askew lived in New York for several months, reciting poetry and occasionally performing songs. Around the same time, he made his first two records as a solo artist, two cosmic folk albums, Ask the Unicorn and Little Eyes, for the New York jazz label ESP-Disk. The former became a cult curio. The latter remained unpublished until 2002. Between these two songs, Askew paused his recording practice from the late 1960s until the mid-’80s, when he returned to New York. He self-released hundreds of songs on cassette, frequently emailed them to friends, and decades later collected them on his Bandcamp page.
The release of Little Eyes attracted a wider audience, and with encouragement, first from De Stijl’s record label and then from other labels, including OSR Tapes, Askew began recording music on a more consistent schedule. He began reissuing the album, and also began taking his divine live show on tours such as: Bill Callahan and the Black Swans. In 2013, he finally returned to the studio and released For the World, his first new album since the 1960s. Released by Tin Angel, it featured collaborations with Sharon Van Etten, Mary Lattimore, Marc Ribot, Black Swans, and more. After a series of solo albums and collaborations, the final album of his career, “Sleeping With Angels,” was released in 2021. As Jay Plack wrote for Pitchfork, two more songs are in the works. One was produced by Jerry DeSicca of the Black Swans, and the other was recorded live-to-track with Joanna Sternberg as a guest.
