For the provocative singer and rapper, viral success came with some negative attention. But now, with help from mushrooms and the Welsh countryside, they’re in a better place
A few months ago, Ashton Casey, AKA the US rapper, singer and purveyor of industrial-strength agit-pop Ashnikko, escaped from the real world. The artist, who uses they/them pronouns, had been working hard to finish their brain-frying debut album Weedkiller – a climate crisis-evoking conceptual opus about a tribe of fairies under attack from the titular killing machine – and there were tour rehearsals to start and world-building videos to shoot. So Casey did what any of us would do and hopped over to west Wales to stare at trees. “I love Wales so much; it’s my favourite place on Earth,” Casey says from LA. “It’s a magic fairy paradise.” As befits Ashnikko’s desire to push the envelope, be it musically or vis-a-vis enjoying the natural world, there was an additional element of escapism. “Taking magic mushrooms is a spiritual practice as well as something that massively aids my mental health journey,” Casey explains of their chosen holiday must-have. “I feel so much more connected to the Earth, and my creativity flows a bit more easily when I feel that way.”
That creativity bubbles like lava through Ashnikko’s discography: the pummelling recent single You Make Me Sick!; 2019’s braggadocious breakthrough Stupid, complete with its screamed hook “Wet! Wet! Wet! Wet!”; or 2020’s haunted trap banger Daisy, a rape revenge fantasy that landed in the UK Top 30. Today, however, Casey seems miles away from the blue-haired, Y2K-obsessed cyberpunk-meets-goblin anime comic-book hero they present as Ashnikko, a character creation they see as becoming “closer and closer to who I am as the years go on”. Having just arrived in LA before heading to San Diego for Comic-Con, where they will be signing copies of their own Weedkiller-affiliated DC comic, they seem distant at first, not helped by the Zoom camera being turned off. “I’ve just woken up,” Casey sighs.
Continue reading...by Michael Cragg via Electronic music | The Guardian
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