There is a scene in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s J-horror Kairo that has become internet-famous as a reference point for the feeling that something is wrong. In it, a ghost walks slowly, deliberately towards the camera, forcing the viewer to face the glacial terror of something you don’t understand happening to you.
It’s in this specific space that ‘Her Side’, the debut EP from microtonal pop composer Maddie Ashman, comes alive, its songs celebrating the uncanny through corrupted melodies, crashing drops and a sense of possibility that veers between the euphoric and unnerving. “It’s very exciting to do something that messes with your brain,” she tells NME. “And makes you really question everything.”
Speaking over Zoom on a sunny London morning in late January, the Hampshire-born musician is all smiles as she discusses her attempts to provoke through her writing. She trains a pop lens on microtonal composition – an approach that breaks apart the familiar sounds of the western canon by embracing smaller intervals than those found in the standard 12-note scale. The skittering synth hooks of her recent single ‘Jaded’, for example, orbit a chord progression that should feel safe and reassuring, but doesn’t. As it descends, it slowly dissolves into squelchy mayhem.
“The 12 notes on the piano, technically, they’re not in tune with the physics of sound,” she says. “You can subvert that. That’s something we take for granted, but we don’t realise everything that’s underneath it. Even if you can’t hear the seventh harmonic take over and pivot, the way you internalise the music is different. It’s not necessarily a good feeling, either. It can be quite uncomfortable.”
Ashman’s EP is already eliciting uneasy reactions with some listeners telling her about some moments, ‘It feels like I’m high. I don’t trust myself right now.’ “Other people really melt into it,” she continues. “In a world where everything is very convenient, it feels very exciting to do something that’s incredibly inconvenient.”
Ashman is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a classically trained musician. She is eye-openingly proficient across guitar, piano and cello and studied music at Goldsmiths. Branching off from this background, ‘Her Side’ was part-funded by several organisations as an investigation of microtonal techniques.
If that makes it sound fusty or inert, it’s not. It’s fizzing with possibilities – these songs clatter and whirr with melodic energy, but their ace is the manner in which Ashman sharpens her esoteric combination of mathematics, musical theory and virtuosity into something capable of uncovering emotion.
On ‘Waterlily’, she pulls apart societal pressure to conform; the track’s lilting, rolling instrumental eventually cut apart by a cello countermelody that feels like an intrusive thought. It’s a fascinating marriage of form and meaning, with the how and why of music-making meeting in the middle. “The whole thing is very perception-versus-reality,” she says of its thematic focus. “We all live in our little inner worlds, and they can feel more like reality than reality.”
“In a world where everything is very convenient, it feels very exciting to do something that’s incredibly inconvenient”
Throughout, as it moves from synapse-scrambling rhythms to choral reflection, there is also the feeling that ‘Her Side’ is a thrilling statement of pop intent released at an opportune moment. If Charli XCX, a dyed-in-the-wool weirdo, can be one of the biggest stars on the planet, then there’s space for Ashman’s sonic excursions to exist in close proximity to the mainstream, perhaps even right at the heart of it. “Rosalía’s album [‘Lux’] is so out there and controversial, it caused a lot of discussion,” Ashman says. “That’s really exciting. I do feel like it’s a good time, while everyone’s being inundated with AI, to be doing something a bit more challenging.”
For better and worse, discussion has been part of Ashman’s story since the start. As she wandered further out into the microtonal hinterland, she began uploading short clips of herself playing at home to social media, the domestic scene behind her remaining constant as her music became unmoored from convention.
Quickly, she racked up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers, helped in part by a reel of her playing ‘Dark’, an abrasively free-spirited guitar-and-voice experiment, going viral last spring and co-signs from industry luminaries including Anthony Fantano, Caroline Polachek and Sampha. On the other side of the coin, though, you don’t have to scroll too far through the comments to find dissenting voices who want Ashman to know that she’s freaking out their cats.
“I find that really exciting,” she says. “That’s what art is about, you know? It’s not necessarily what commercial music’s about, but art definitely is. I found that I enjoyed having people give their own takes on it. That made it easier to be like, ‘Actually, I can explore these concepts and package them in ways that people might understand.’ That’s important to me. I want people to see it through my eyes, rather than having this vision of what microtonal music is. I like the idea that the way I’m presenting it is very aggravating for some people because it changes the narrative. It keeps it away from this technical, gate-kept thing. It’s actually a whole universe.”
Backing up this philosophy, Ashman is continually refining her methods, with zero concessions coming the way of anyone who’s finding it all a bit much. Having already collaborated with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Jon Hopkins and ‘Her Side’ mixer Leo Abrahams in performance settings, she is building towards incorporating live drums into her own show, upping the energy while revelling in the fact that there’s no skip button available to her audience once the house lights go down. “If you have headphones on, in the uncomfortable bits you can always be like next,” she says. “But in a live environment, you really have to sit with that.”
Writing, meanwhile, is well underway for her next project, which will be with us sooner rather than later. “Hopefully we’ll be releasing music very shortly after this EP,” Ashman says. “With ‘Her Side’, there’s the feeling everything is holding together. There are cracks, and there’s tension. But with the newer songs, it’s all out there. We’ve broken through those walls – it’s more direct, it’s more in your face, which feels like the natural conclusion.”
Maddie Ashman’s ‘Her Side’ is out on February 6 via AWAL.