He came out of the white heat of Houston, a man etched in the stark geography of the Texas scrub, and he carried the dust of it all the way to the salt-slicked air of Oakland. His name was Greg Ashley. He was a maker of songs and a carver of sound, a technician of the electrical ghost. For twenty years he moved through the world like a wolf across a frozen tundra, solitary and lean, leaving a trail of black-wax records in his wake.
In the year 2003, a man named David Katznelson of Birdman Records laid hands on a burned CD—a silver disc of raw, solo static—and the pact was sealed. Thus rose The Gris Gris. They were a four-headed beast: Ashley on the wire-strung guitar and vocals, Joe Haener hammering the skins, Oscar Michel on the low-thrumming bass, and Lars Kullberg tickling the ivories. They played a music of the spheres if those spheres were cracked and leaking oil. It was a black magic psych cult, a primitive stomp that blended the old hallucinatory echoes with a garage-punk violence that would make a sane man seek the nearest exit.
They cut their self-titled debut in 2004, birthing the single “Mary No. 38,” a track that rattled the teeth. By 2005 they had wrought For the Season, and they rode that dark horse until the end came in 2009 with a record called Live at the Creamery. Then the band dissolved into the ether, leaving only the smell of ozone and spent tubes.
But Ashley was a man possessed by a restless, shivering muse. He had come from The Mirrors and the Strate Coats, and he was not about to go quiet. He retreated to his fortress, a recording studio dubbed The Creamery. There he birthed a long line of solo works—Medicine Fuck Dream in 2003, Painted Garden in 2007, and the Requiem Mass of 2010. He chronicled the rot and the beauty in Another Generation of Slaves and Pictures of Saint Paul Street. By the time Fiction is Non-Fiction and Radio MDMA arrived, he was a veteran of the psychological wars, culminating in the 2025 arrival of Neon Exotica. He even reached back into the graveyard of pop to exhume Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Ladies’ Man, re-recording the whole damn thing as a testament to the heavy-hearted.
He wrote a book too. Called it Anecdotes. It was published around 2019, and it wasn’t some flowery rock-star rag. It was a cold, hard stare into the sun. A proper anti-drug book. He told of the Texas dirt and the Oakland psych-rot, of the crack-pipes and the blackouts and the shivering, sweating hell of the detox. It was a sobering reminder to any young buck with a guitar that the “interesting” life of a twenty-one-year-old is just a sad, dull funeral by the time you hit thirty-five.
He looked at the world and saw a “bullshit society,” a rigged game where the winners toss down consolation prizes like scraps to a mangy dog. He lived on San Pablo Avenue—the “Saint Paul Street” of his songs—a place of pure, unadulterated debauchery. He’d tell you that a man’s soul fares better in the “sticks,” even if the money is thin as a winter coat in a blizzard.
He was a crotchety ghost in the machine. He held onto his Hotmail account like a man clutching a life raft in a digital storm and treated the smartphone like a demonic artifact he couldn’t quite master. He didn’t care if the fans liked his shifts in tone or his jagged turns. He played for the truth of the note, not the applause of the crowd. He stood on the deck of a sinking civilization, indifferent to the water at his knees, still twisting the knobs on a tape deck to find that one perfect, agonizing frequency.
to buy one or two of Gregs Brilliant books hit him up on face book or insta gram @the_creamery_studio
-Ellis Jones
Chainsaw Magazine 