A self-rendered 3D idol racing through pixelated streets: Meet Niall Ashley

Niall Ashley is a SimStar: a self-rendered idol navigating memory, trauma, and digital stardom through glitched-out visuals and genre-defying sound. Their debut EP Subject Access feels like a dive into someone’s innermost memory bank: a chaotic, digitised archive of play, rejection, survival, and escape.

Part diary, part VR dreamscape, Niall’s visuals pull you through a Windows Vista-core cityscape filled with low-res clouds, government-grey fonts, and 16-bit streets that look straight out of a racing game. All the while, Niall’s digital persona sings mantra-like songs directly to you, dancing, swinging their two-toned locs, punching the pixelated air around them. Defiant and deeply online, Niall’s work is haunted by nostalgia, but never trapped by it. The conversation that follows touches everything from hauntology and video game OSTs to family estrangement and the radical agency of the digital self. And despite all the trauma and tough topics, there’s something strangely comforting in how they see the world full of potential. “Nostalgia is oxygen right now,” Niall says. And they’re breathing it in, just long enough to rewire it.

Read on to discover someone who’s built a world where the digital self doesn’t just survive — it dreams, dances, and maybe even finds freedom. Welcome to their simulation.

Hi! How are you doing?
Yoo I’m really good thank you, just recently moved somewhere stable so I’m feeling more settled 🙂

You recently released a music video for your song, “My Heart Bleeds” off of your debut EP, Subject Access! Congratulations, how do you feel?
Yes, I feel cathartic after its release. This song is a transformation of trauma to freedom, so visually I wanted the weightless-ness and ultimately carelessness (in the best sense) to be translated, almost like when you’re daydreaming to yourself as a kid flying through a city like Nausica or any Miyazaki film really. “My Heart Bleeds” was written like a mantra or spiritual spell; of course the sentence could have quite a painful connotation but the song’s intention is wearing pain on your sleeve and letting it bud and transmute wings for you to finally fly.

The visual language of the video clip is incredibly novel and seems to touch on a digital mode of expression also seen in “Ghost of Your Life”. Can you dive into the story behind your visual presentation?
Sequentially, these videos are an intro to my world as a budding SimStar (Simulated Idol). A window into my endeavour of trying to break through as an artist in an ever growing digital world. You might have picked up on the narrator’s voice throughout each video, who is a representative of USERNAME, a corpo label that has set its eyes on me. Each song is a braindance into my fractured unconscious, forming VR-like dream sequences that show real formative experiences to my art, identity, weaknesses and strengths. Imagine if a college football coach could pick up a candidate and immediately run 1000s of simulations of their predictive plays, stand-out moments and shortcomings all in the blink of an eye? That’s what Subject Access is, an audition tape for big corporation’s internal use.

As a part of Subject Access, are these visuals a glimpse into your subjectivity? To what extent is your perception of reality imbued into your audiovisual persona?
There is a glimpse into my life for sure. I’ve mentioned this before, but the cover art is a handful of custody mugshots from pre-teen to teenager when I was being abused by my family. I’ve embedded lots of real-world experiences into this audiovisual world. Trying to mix a factitious 3D-rendered world with my real life. I see the digital and the physical flattened into one hybrid, borrowing ideals from Serial Experiments Lain and William Gibson’s Neuromancer Trilogy. I think Sadie Plant’s lens on identity and gender via the ‘affirmative zero’ is a crucial concept tying into my digital identity, decentering fixed social identities typically seen in our day-to-day physical life. My digital self isn’t a puppet with strings being controlled by some higher-power metaspace me; It has its own agency. The visuals give my doppelgänger a stage to perform on. Over time, I want to peel back the curtain on that narrative, letting the digital self and the physical self interact more openly (You can see glimpses of that in my “Frightened” music video).

How does your visual language contribute to your musical world-building?
There’s a thing called a Subject Access form, which is a request submitted to an organisation to obtain personal data they hold about you. So for this project I’ve tried to incorporate the nullified stylistic quality of modern day form sending, an ode to David Graeber. I swapped the low-hanging fruit of vibrancy or Window’s vista/iPhone ad visual language prominent today in popular culture, for the greys of legacy civil servant companies and the lifeblood of industry. I created the pixelated typeface you see throughout all the content, taking inspiration from the internal use fonts you’d see used on government documents. It’s funny cause I got a Graphic Design degree and I’ve felt slightly ashamed of not using it for anything important but finally I feel the use-case with creating the world behind an EP.    

It’s incredible to watch, and based on the comments on the clip, it touched a lot of people. Why do you think that is?
I am hoping it’s because I am baring my soul for the public hahah, I am not sure to what extent that is healthy, but I am really putting my identity into my music and world for the first time. I am very grateful, it really took me by surprise!

On a larger scale, your EP is phenomenal to listen to, it blends genres and seems timeless – I read that you also produced and wrote it. How was the process of producing this project, of having complete control over your vision?
Thank you, that’s really kind! To be honest, I wrote it at such a chaotic and negative time in my life being homeless and losing a lot of my identity, discarding my old alias due to the distorted path it took. I had kind of fallen out of love with making, and it felt like any sort of aesthetically pleasing, ‘cool’ or confident mode I had previously was breaking at the seams. Which I think led me to just using the music as a journal. It was uncomfortable writing these songs and I also knew they would be the death of my relationship with my family and any old friends airing out my experiences lyrically. Thus, it was emotionally quite taxing. Yet coincidentally, it felt like a breath of fresh air blending genres that I have hidden my interest in for years out of this made-up zeitgeist pressure to fit one box that I had constructed for myself. I initially ran to Hip-Hop and its underground subcultures as on paper it fitted the most with my formative experiences, but I didn’t factor in all the parts of myself that defy those links and enjoy other genres. All the years I wasn’t living rough and I just was playing games, or even trying to code them. Making this project allowed me to see myself as a whole rather than hyper-focused parts that have to fit perfectly into a jigsaw puzzle. 

“Influences from fellow Bristol artists Massive Attack and Portishead meet the echoes of his mother’s abandoned dream of becoming a famous singer,” is a line taken from an artist bio on your Instagram. I think this is a fascinating remark, diving deeper into your roots in Bristol and your attachments to musical artistry, what pushes you to create as an artist?
Defiance 100%. I loath bureaucratic rules, oppressive systems of thinking and bias. This is why I was always getting kicked out of school as a kid. I think a life that isn’t going against some force is a boring one, and I want my work to be a beacon of counteractive changing force.

You mention your loyalty to suffusing your sound with Hauntology, what are the spectres that haunt you and inadvertently travel to the sounds you haunt your audiences with?
It’s the obvious elephant in the room, but nostalgia is oxygen right now. It’s inescapable, even if you think you can subvert it, every opposing move has been fed into the algorithmic machine and birthed a niche pop culture reference. I think my generation has got the right starting point, which is accepting nostalgia and using it as a weapon rather than letting it swallow you whole. Of course how unaffected can you be if you’re using the same oppressive matter? That’s the core issue right now that I am trying to navigate in my own work. But another thing that haunts me is trauma, so I’ve been creating concoctions of rose-tinted nostalgic paints in a palette and coating it in experiences that are not-so-aesthetically pleasing. A sort of fracturing of time, doing the opposite of what the brain wants. 

It’s so easy for me to binge Video Game OSTs and think this is the epicenter of cool media, whilst singlehandedly dashing all the real-life experiences I had at the time of consumption. I think we have to stop cherry-picking and selling fantasies and rather insert ourselves into the nostalgic building blocks we use. We must inherit the whole codebase and enhance it with the tools of our time. So that’s what I’m trying to do, if that makes sense!

It does! And how do you retain a level of control over​​ those spectres?
I have no idea, I try to remain considerate over what I’m referencing although you don’t want to start policing yourself from creating autonomously so it’s a tough balance! If anyone has any answers please let me know!

You recently did a mix for NTS! Super fun, what do you think are the biggest differences in trying to tell a sonic story with your projects and tracks vs tracks by other artists?
Sooo different! Starting to mix gave me so much more respect for DJs, it be looking effortless when you see friends do it, idk why I thought using a DAW just gave you an instant edge like riding a bike or something. The NTS mix was simply my favourite Video Game OSTs + extra games like KOF XI, Ridge Racer V, Street Fighter III Third Strike etc. I’ve never personally seen people put a light on the vast music of the gaming space – usually it’s done in a very compilation format by people you know aren’t true fans of the work. Even I’ve been a culprit of this, loving Silent Hill Soundtracks yet being so afraid of the damn series lmao; an at home walkthrough enthusiast with not enough battle wounds from completing titles. So at every opportunity I want to showcase all the weird, obscure and mainstream titles I’ve been blessed to find and play. I wish I could say I intentionally planned out the narrative like I do for my music, but it was chaos: just chucking on the next favourite tune, hoping the bpm lines up and being overly excited. 

I’m curious, can you give me three of your favourite things at the moment?
Recently completed Katamari Damacy on PS2 which I proudly admit I found from a TikTok lmao, it never released officially in PAL so I’m blaming my lack of knowledge on that. Love rolling a big ball of clutter, very therapeutic. The Witcher 4 Tech Demo is pretty groundbreaking, couldn’t care less about the reddit neckbeards inching to attack because of UE5 stutter issues and armchair knowledge, that thing looks incredible. No more alpha card foliage, absolute mazza for the real-time and gaming world. Check digital foundry’s Q&A for a deeper dive too if you’re into that.

Lastly, I’m really getting into tracker-based workflow in music, rather than a classical DAW. Been making some fun ideas that feel a lot more in tangent with my world, kind of like the drums I made for “Ghost of Your Life”, very IDM.

What can we expect from you next?
New music and new characters;)