Ashby, Mark

Since the age of 17, Maryland-based keyboardist and guitarist Mark Ashby has been writing and releasing his original instrumental compositions, taking diverse influences from krautrock to British progressive to pounding industrial music and fusing them into a unique style that is quickly becoming easily identifiable.
While currently at work on more projects, including another Distance album tentatively entitled Martyr, Ashby helped remaster and release a project from 1995 called The Gate with Polish keyboardist/composer Jacek Spruch on Spruch’s Underwater Music label. Going by the group name ESP, Ashby and Spruch initially worked together in the mid-‘90s on the track "Connections" on Ashby’s solo cassette Independent Thoughts, soon moving on to a more ambitious transcontinental collaboration that became these four tracks. However, the tapes remained in the vault until early 2001.