AshTreJinkins - IT'S TRASH NOW (2023)

IT’S TRASH NOW, out December 1, 2023, on Leaving Records, functions as a (mostly) wordless love letter to the music. But It’s also a screed, a manifesto, a series of abstracted diary entries, and/or a catalog of feelings experienced in half-remembered dreams.

AshTreJinkins, LA native beatmaker, producer, rapper, is full of joy and fire and a fierce allegiance to— that is, an impulse to both rep and defend— the genres and scenes in which he cut his teeth. This overflow of energy is evident throughout and across the release; including in the picture of Jinkins that is the album’s cover. He’s yanking a wild knit cap down over his eyes, mouth agape, maybe cracking up? Maybe crying out in exaggerated frustration…? At what? At all the bullshit and nonsense—the “trash” (of which, we must admit there is plenty). But this man isn’t bitter. He’s just committed. And frustration, especially when it’s paired with a decent sense of humor (as it consistently is throughout TRASH), is an energy that can be harnessed and alchemized.

“It’s Trash Now…” We should acknowledge the sonic and imagistic rhymes that exist between the album name and Jinkins’s artistic moniker: “It’s trash” and “AshTre”… Jinkins is a self-styled connoisseur of grit, sifting through yesteryear’s beats like a crust punk searching for that one cigarette butt with a little tobacco left. He’s salvaging the goods and casting off the cheap imitations—all the pretenders to the throne.

The first track, “MYSPACE 2006,” situates us, temporally and aesthetically. Those who were there then know (and those who weren’t probably can’t ever know) but the initial advent of social media, and Myspace in particular, constituted a wild leap forward for DIY musicians, a rapid expansion of one’s horizons—influences, connections, potential, etc. One minute you’re a kid listening to gospel and Jill Scott in the backseat of your mom’s car, then you’re installing FruityLoops 7 on your family desktop. Next thing you know Ras G is watching you play your first cypher and, pretty shortly thereafter, he’s treating you to your first proper Ethiopian dinner, willing and happy to talk the good talk. This is all, of course, assuming you’re someone possessed with talent, ambitions, and curiosity of spirit on Jinkins’s level.

This ambition carries with it a bite: a visceral skepticism cast towards those chasing the money, the fame, the notoriety, the clout, at the expense of the music. In title alone, TRASH’s first single “NOT COCO BUTTER ENUFF,” functions as an indictment of the commercially friendly neo-soul that has, to Jinkins’s mind, dead-ended so many promising experimental careers. That the track is one of the records’ most recursive and texturally gritty is maybe no accident. Likewise the deceptively slippery, almost psychedelic “YOU WERE NOT SPACE BASE APPROVED,”is a sideways meditation on the unfortunate inevitability of fools rushing in after a legend dies, trying to consume all the oxygen.

TRASH straddles ambient and, broadly, the California beat stuff that drew Tre into first performing. “LEVELS TO THIS” is a circa ‘09 Low End Theory redux barn burner if ever there was one. The record’s final track, “WE NOT LINCOLN,” is comparatively laid back, but the hits aren’t shy in the mix, and if you let the track lure you in, there’s a sort of *wink wink / nudge nudge* IDM nostalgia that reveals itself. Nostalgia, indeed, as well as humor (of the wry and quick-witted variety) are two of the record’s most readily identifiable colors. “DRUG DEPRESSED,” the record’s second track and a pseudo-interlude, feels simultaneously genuinely confessional (the track begins with the modulated admission, “...I am drug depressed”), and, also, maybe a little bit willfully goofy? With its warbly, shuddering foundation. We can’t ever say for certain when Jinkins’s tongue is or is not planted firmly in cheek. But it doesn’t really matter. Sarcasm and sincerity can, in fact, coexist, and this thesis can be proven by an eleven track instrumental electronic hip-hop (choose yr additional genre qualifier of choice) record. Jinkins is, to borrow a couple phrases from one of IT’S TRASH NOW’s track titles, a “young old head,” with a “day one archive.” And fellow heads of all ages and backgrounds would be wise to tune in.