A SCARLET AND A KNIFE

Ash Vasquez - Vocals
Kyle Mortensen - Music

A SCARLET AND A KNIFE (ASXAK) is the new creative collaboration from Ash Vasquez and Kyle Mortensen. Born in Hollywood, CA, ASXAK is a cinematic world built around music, storytelling, and the tension between what we want and what we’re willing to risk to get it. The love story and the knife wound told as one.

At its center are Ash Vasquez and Kyle Mortensen, partners in life and in art, bringing together their shared obsession with rock & roll, filmmaking, fashion, horror, and the beautiful mess of being human. Their relationship is part of the fabric of ASXAK, where the line between love and obsession, intimacy and danger, and life and art is rarely as clear as it seems. Rather than treating music as the soundtrack to a visual world, ASXAK builds the two together. Songs become chapters. Short films become pieces of the story. Characters have secrets. Images have consequences.

Nothing exists simply to look cool.

The project draws heavily from the language of cinema, particularly the dreamlike unease of classic Giallo filmmaking, the saturated worlds of Dario Argento, psychological horror, noir, and the strange places where beauty and violence begin to overlap. But ASXAK isn't trying to recreate the past. It takes those influences and drags them into the present: Los Angeles after dark, lipstick on a cigarette, red leather, the smell of something burning, glitching neon, the taste of blood, and the uncomfortable intimacy of watching someone become something else.

The first chapter begins with Lightning Strike.

But the song is only part of the story.

Around each release, ASXAK creates an evolving series of narrative short films that unfold across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. These aren't traditional music videos or artists performing directly into a camera. They are fragments of a larger cinematic experience, built to reward attention and leave questions behind.

A hallway. A mirror. A bar after midnight. A woman lying in black water. A message that should never have been sent. A door that may or may not be hiding something behind it.

The stories don't always explain themselves. They aren't supposed to.

Somewhere between the songs, films, photographs, fashion, and fragments of the narrative, the audience begins to piece together a world of their own.

That immersive approach is at the heart of A SCARLET AND A KNIFE. The project isn't interested in separating the music from the mythology, or the mythology from the people making it. Everything feeds everything else.

The result is a project that feels less like a band and more like stepping into a movie that hasn't finished being written.

There is something romantic about it.

There is something dangerous about it.

And there is always something just out of frame.

A SCARLET AND A KNIFE is for anyone who has ever fallen too hard, stayed too long, wanted too much, or discovered that sometimes the things that hurt us the most are the ones that make us feel most alive.

Rock & roll in something expensive.

Luxury with dirt under its fingernails.

A certain kind of beautiful that draws blood.

Welcome to A SCARLET AND A KNIFE.