A new album from Asa Nisi Masa evokes scrolling the internet at night

Jack Fanciulli pulled a can of Red Bull from his bag and put it down next to a pouch of tobacco on a table in the Irish Film Institute’s courtyard.

A construction worker’s dinner, he says, laughing. “Breakfast of champions.”

It was just after 4pm on a Wednesday in mid-September. He had found the can in his bedroom that morning, he says. “I was up late last night looking at the moon.”

A harvest moon, it was. “It was alright,” he said.

Fanciulli records and performs under the moniker Asa Nisi Masa, a reference to a nonsensical phrase from Italian director Frederico Fellini’s surreal semi-autobiographical film 8 ½. He had released his second album just a few days earlier.

The ironically titled Days Without Night is the sprawling expression of his restlessness, drenched in neon synthesisers, which sometimes shudder like a strobe light.

It is packed with layers of howling, distorted guitars, and groggy, almost delirious vocals, that are as vulnerable as they are uncanny as he processes an auto-tuning effect or alters their pitch.

A DJ in the city, Fanciulli’s debut album, The Stone That Breaks The Hapless Head, was more heavy on the dance, propelled by breakneck rhythms.

Fanciulli was looking to move away from that this time around. He wanted to remove the new record from the club, he says. “Because I was removed from the club, mentally. There aren’t really dance songs.”

Days Without Night features drums, sure. But he wanted to make them heavier and less danceable, he says.

He wanted to produce something more reflective of his experience as an insomniac immersed in internet culture, he says. “Being online, nothing feels real, and with lack of sleep, everything becomes like a dream.”

“I suppose the earnestness of the record is trying to reclaim some sense of embodiment,” he says.

Striking a chord

Faniciulli’s work grapples with the dissociative feeling of being “terminally online”, he says.

On a very basic level, it achieves this by contrasting a foundation of digital synthesisers with the more tangible feel of his guitar.

This wasn’t really a deliberate choice, he says. “Guitar is just the way I can understand music.”

A guitarist for about 11 years now, he started to gig around Dublin in his teens with the band Jerusalem, he says. “It was noisy stuff. But we gigged in Denmark, in [Freetown] Christiania, which was a bizarre time.”

Covid made rehearsals near-impossible, so he turned to music software like Ableton and shifted to a more electronic sound, he says.

Being in a band of two or three had been frustrating in ways, he said. “It limited sound options. I always wanted to do more expansive stuff.”

Asa Nisi Masa emerged from that. Fanciulli’s focus moved from live gigs to studio.

His debut album, The Stone That Breaks The Hapless Head – which was released in October 2022 – is a largely instrumental collage of rhythmic samples, abrasive and dreamy guitars, and an array of found sounds, like dialogue from old documentaries.

He started to establish a name for himself in the local underground dance scene, sticking out from his peers by dint of his instrument of choice: the electric guitar.

He incorporated it into DJing, in part, out of insecurity, he says. “I always felt like a bit of a phoney. I didn’t grow up in the club or come from club culture.”

He wasn’t the smoothest behind a booth, and using a guitar made him feel like less of an imposter, he says, laughing. “I was at least trying to be honest with myself.”

Others have embraced that distinction. During 2023, he contributed to producer Rory Sweeney’s double album, Trash Catalogue, with a blissfully meandering solo over bouncy digital synths on the track “Go, Go”.

A sermon

On the last Sunday evening in September, the altar in St Finian’s Lutheran Church glowed red. Most of the congregation in the pews wore their hoods up, soaked by the heavy rains coming down outside.

A thundering, slow programmed drumbeat boomed through the room.

Like his audience, Fanciulli was hooded. He had his back to them as he swayed, looking up to the crucifix and stained-glass windows at the front of the room.

His voice was pitched up. “Don’t sleep,” he sang, into a microphone which he clasped with both hands.

After a few minutes, he picked up his Fender Jazzmaster guitar, and hammered fuzzy droning riffs over luscious synthesisers.

As he strummed, his playing hand gripped a hold of a tremolo bar screwed into the guitar’s bridge, bending each note like a cassette tape speeding up and down.

“God forgive me,” he sang as his guitar made a wall of feedback and a sample of an indistinct voice played.

Most of his lyrics are about God in some way, he had said, earlier, laughing a little. “I feel like most of them, in the background of it, have like the end of the world. I’d like to confront that a bit more.”

Rarely using the microphone stand, he mostly switched between the guitar and mic throughout the set. Aside from one song when, in the middle, he used both simultaneously.

He bellowed into the microphone in his right hand. Each time he sang in falsetto his voice cracked. He kept his left hand near the guitar’s neck, pounding his fingers against the strings to make ominous clanging chords.

For 40 minutes, this onslaught of cacophonous music filled the church, His audience sat still, in silent reverence.

The gig leapt between extremes. Samples of birdsong one minute. Sludgy doom metal and layered electronics the next.

Towards the finale, Fanciulli mumbled into the mic quietly, tuning up his guitar, and lacing into a more straightforward garage-y emo riff, given his distinct stamp by his raw voice.

As his performance reached its conclusion, he allowed his guitar to ring out on an E chord, crescendoing until it resonated like a church bell.

“Thank you so much,” he said, and the lights went up.

Sincerity over irony

It is the sincerity of Asa Nisi Masa that distinguishes it, says Lauren Haughey, who grew up with Fanciulli and with whom he co-founded Hypostasis, an events organisers behind the St Finian’s gig.

“What I always find frustrating is that there is a contemporary trend of, if you do things that are experimental or alienating, you felt you had to be overtly ironic,” she says.

Fanciulli stays more true to himself and takes the work seriously, she says. “I always admire that straightforwardness in being honest.”

Fanciulli says that, in part, he is grappling in songs with the feeling of being chronically online.

While making Days Without Night, his mindset changed, he says. “I had been engrossed in these niche Soundcloud sounds, very digital online art and music that I found dangerous, very on-the-edge, and I was exposed to so many different things.”

That’s one of the realities of being online for prolonged periods, he says. “You’re constantly experiencing these conflicting things, and you lose yourself.”

The record is confused, he says. “Because I was confused at the time.”

Moving front and centre as a vocalist on the new album helped to harness that chaos, he says. “It needed intimacy in it, because I felt I was lost in an endless abyss of genres and influences.”

“In the end,” he says, “it was nice to reclaim some sort of self.”