Astronaut

Astronaut is the fourth studio album by the London-based musician and DJ Ash Walker, released by Night Time Stories on 30 June 2023. It features contributions by Lou Rhodes, Andrew Ashong, Amp Fiddler, Joe Armon-Jones, and Yazz Ahmed, among others. Background Ash Walker wrote the album on different locations with a number of sessions musicians and collaborators. He almost finished working on the album by 2020 but wasn't happy with the mixes, so he invited a friend to help him with EQ and decided to replace a track. He has described his recording technique on Astronaut as an "anti-sound engineer" approach because he thinks that "[sitting] for weeks and months trying to iron out bits of white noise or EQing this and that" detracts him from his vision about how the album should sound. Walker described the concept of the album: Reception John-Paul Shiver of Treble wrote, "For some, the ideology of stretching across decades of musical ideas reaching from Duke Ellington to King Tubby, Pete Rock to Curtis Mayfield would just short-circuit some arrangers’ brainwave activity. But Mr. Walker has the first concept down right that sees his herculean projects of putting soul into this time-traveling entity come to fruition without exception", and "Walker and his laundry list of experts—Andrew Ashong, Ebi Soda, Oscar Jerome, Joe Armon-Jones, Yazz Ahmed and Kennebec—bunker down for the dignified arrangements, an school Quincy Jones feeling, that I can attest will stick with you for days, weeks, seasons and most definitely years."