The London-based, Bristol-bred artist Niall Ashley’s newest EP is their most personal to date. Subject Access dives into the artist’s narrative, especially their coming-of-age, and it does it with a loping, jazzy style that is as indebted to trip hop as it is the Los Angeles beat scene. Probably not coincidentally, one song features co-production from SoCal legend Daedelus. Taken as a whole, the project deploys dense beats and nuanced sonics as a tool to hit at some serious emotional catharsis. We talked to the artist about the record, growing up in Bristol, the power of sound design, and a whole lot more. Give the interview a read and listen to Subject Access below. 

Tell us about the new EP. Do you see it as a bit of a swerve from some of your heavier work?

Niall Ashley: This is my heaviest work due to the songwriting being directly linked to the most traumatic years of my teenagehood. "How Dare You” directly addresses the murder of an ex-girlfriend that sent me into a spiral, eventually not finishing my education and being homeless. And then on “Ghost of Your Life,” I create a conversation between family and myself, the perspective of blame and who is allowed to be aggressor or victim. So for me, this is the heaviest I've ever delved into myself. It's almost quite embarrassing to lay so much of my life on a platter, it feels like there is no protective layer of style, nonchalant-ness or trending subculture to latch onto.

My previous work had a secret manifesto, aiming to always put style over substance. With Subject Access I flip this manifesto on its head. I really want to stop hiding my experience within my work and hoping for visual representation to feel the gaps, for example in my older music I'd love to reference Silent Hill motifs as the tormenting imagery really spoke to my childhood.

How important is sound processing and plug-in customization to your songwriting process?

It's usually step one for me when writing a song. I'll find some video game soundtrack reference—usually there's a synth, drum, or sound that speaks out to me. I try to re-emulate it from scratch with Phase Plant or find the original source point if it’s a vocal sample, really getting into FM synthesis and the weird tonal properties you can add to a sound. There's a guy I follow on YouTube called Joel Blanco Berg who makes the craziest synth patches, like a whole acoustic instrument via layers of waves modulating with complexity—I take a lot of notes from his work whilst failing miserably. Otherwise using a lot of the Ableton tools (I still need to get deeper into MSP), you can achieve some crazy modulation and customization to sounds. 

Who are some producers that have been inspiring you lately?

I've just been having Nintendo DS Frutiger Aero YouTube mixes on repeat for the most part. But otherwise I'm really into Sora at the moment, lots of granular synthesis textures in their work and arpeggios which I've tried to reference in my new music. It adds this glitched memory-like quality to his music, a stream of connected melodies ticking at different rates creating an underlying structure of a song whilst sounding like complete entropic madness. I couldn't say anyone else specifically today, but for sure Sora is a big one.

“Devil’s Pie” is real funky. Could you talk about that song?

Ima be real I have no idea what possessed me to make this song. Initially Daedelus and TUJ had made this crazy electronic instrumental track called “Slammed Tacoma” that was still a WIP, like insane bass, drums hitting. I was thinking yeah I gotta try a rap vocal over this, everything sounds amazing. And then I felt like deep in me, I'm lying to myself if I'm about to rap on some cruddy tip right now at this point in my life where I'm feeling so introspective and emotional. So I decided to scrap everything I had made with it vocally and create some new production elements (funk guitar, acoustic drums, walking bass, dramatic strings, etc.) that leaned into the funky vocoder aesthetic implicitly lying in the track idea. Then the song sort of wrote itself from there. 

I transported myself to a 70s funk vocalist, disco ball spinning, too many white substances dusting my pores, singing about this madonna anima siren entity which I'm begging for to the point of losing all composure. Really classic trope of course, and has classically been a very male-centric lens. But I wanted to give a stab at recontextualising it whilst putting my experience in it, being obsessed with a toxic love, a devil's pie that only destroys me until I'm left soulless. It's also just a fun song to make.

How did growing up in Bristol inform how you make music?

One of my first live music experiences was seeing Massive Attack at the Downs in the pouring rain. On screens they projected numbers of really drastic accelerationist statistics, faces of people passed in wars, and ominous one-liners. I think that show really represented Bristol for me, somewhere where being really passionately anti-anything wasn't deemed corny. I feel that current day there's a lot of backlash to effort or putting your heart on your sleeve, which has always been strange to me growing up in Bristol, where some random person would cheer you on if you had the gall to try something or say something a little different. 

Of course, there's a lot of hipster hippie drifters, too, toting dreadlocks and mandalas in St. Andrews park. However, at the core I think Bristol informs your musical inspirations to be different. Moreover, street art was more the norm to the scheduled gallery experience you see in London. So I think music and art that speaks to a public audience rather than solely a curated higher-class, also rings through my practice due to growing up there.

What’s your favorite pub or restaurant in Bristol and why?

Was never really a drinker so sadly missed out on binging Weatherspoons, but for food (which is mostly going to be takeaway spots because I was dirt poor in Bristol) my vice was this Chinese in St. Werburghs called new Ki-Lee, the chow mein was elite. When I stayed with my family under 16 I would really like Hotwells Fried Chicken too, I don't know if it's a distorted memory but I feel like cheesy chips have been pushed out the cheap food lexicon. I swear I used to eat this weekly, now I can't find it in London.

Are you a big gamer? How does that inform how you make music?

Yes. I love fighting games, specifically Third Strike, King of Fighters XI, or 2002UM, and OG Tekken, anything before five where I couldn't pick up the new combo system and rage arts. Also gotta throw Resident Evil and Wipeout in there too. It's funny, ‘cause I was barely alive or even a figment when most of these retro games came out, yet I've always gravitated to PS1 to PS3-era video games, as well as arcade exclusives you have to run on emulators. 

The soundtracks have been a big gateway into me appreciating jungle on a level that wasn't so prescribed to me from just from living in Bristol. I'll give away a reference, but on "My Heart Bleeds,” after the big drop you'll hear “dance dance” in the back. That's a vocal sample from an obscure 90s CD sample pack (you can find a lot of these on eBay lying around), but that same sample was used in a Rage Racer song. So it was sort of my nod to that song, whilst using the same reference point rather than just directly ripping from the recorded song.

Is it hard to strike a balance between an interest in more traditional musical forms and an eye towards the next level?

I think traditional music creation might be the next level, you know. We're yearning for reality in an orchestrated attention economy. So I think stripping songwriting back to its root, which is writing a song and not creating the best 15 second section for a mass image sharing moment, might be very counterculture in our near future. 

Next level isn't always the next technology. E.g. using lalal.ai to strip the drums off a record and a voice cloner on the lead vocal. Does that push musical forms at its heart to a higher level? Does it serve making a better song? At the end of the day, we're here to imagine better and better ways of describing our futile and turbulent life on this earth, and I think focusing back on that is the goal. I will always be for using the most up-to-date technology where I can, but only if it serves the purpose of explaining my narrative through my eyes best. Not sure if I make sense but that's my take on it.

Photo Credit: Daniel Horitz