For my ears Aya's music, her new album, sounds like electronic Early Music. The Early Music I love from 15th Century. The vocals, the repetitions. The chorus, the song-like quality. With a modern bent. But there is lot to hear and think about. A real sonic surprise.
Building on the club sounds of LOFT, aya’s former alter ego, and extending into the realms of musique concrète, drone, and knotty wordplay, the Huddersfield-raised, London-based artist’s debut album, im hole, takes her boundless energy and unbridled creative instincts into a wild new space. On record, her voice is either pitched up and wreathed in the clammy reverb of a small, dank tunnel, or digitally pulverized and scattered to the winds. On paper—the album’s physical edition is a clothbound book—her lyrics take the form of carefully typeset poems whose butterfingered misspellings (“once went west ypp off ur chesdt my ribssn embpdty vessel,abeadt slippd an ekxtra stuttr fluttr midst th wrestl alll breath losstt”) reflect their origin as notes tapped out on her phone in what she has described as states of “transient psychosis.”
aya’s previous releases hewed to more or less familiar traditions of experimental club music. “a fflash gun for a ffiver,” from last year’s Physically Sick 3 compilation, recalls the intricate, jewel-toned bass investigations of labels like Wisdom Teeth, where LOFT released an early EP in 2017. The cartoonish vocal processing of last year’s playful “delishus” sounds like an homage to SOPHIE songs like “Lemonade” and “Hard.” But on im hole, some of aya’s playfulness has burned off, making way for a steely, psychedelic intensity.
The opening track, “somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor,” charts strange new territory. Over a chilly microtonal blast—recorded with her phone in the stairwell between the eighth and ninth floors of her old apartment building, where the wind screaming through a broken window created an uncannily electronic-sounding effect—she intones a sing-song incantation in a witchy pipsqueak: “Me, more, me, more, me, more. Red or blue, me, more, red or blue, red or blue. Red shoes or blue shoes! Red shoes or blue shoes!” It sounds less like a song than a spell being cast. And by the track’s end, a magical transformation has taken place, one that introduces the autobiographical theme that gives this baffling, enveloping album the personal gravitas to balance its dazzling sonic fireworks: “Last year I came round from a hole/With a broken thumb/And a note on my phone/Four words,” she croaks, her voice digitally garbled: “Thee/Vibe/Hath/Changed.”
Change is deeply woven into the album’s fabric. Sounds shift their shapes in midair; rhythms morph; timbres transmogrify. aya favors volatile textures evocative of blown glass, oily concrete, and quaking Jell-O, but the provenance of any given sound is rarely clear. On “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under,” her voice takes on a gravelly, fluctuating buzz, as though she were hissing into the rotors of a swiveling electric fan. On the instrumental “dis yacky,” crows caw over dangerously arrhythmic breakbeats while a gummy acid bassline tries desperately to hold the song’s jagged shards together. Even at the music’s most overwhelmingly physical—like the tinnitus-and-nausea cocktail of pinging highs and oozing sub-bass of “tailwind”—this is as spare as her music has sounded; rarely are more than a handful of elements in play at any given moment. A few tracks are essentially spoken-word poetry set to industrial grinding and buzzing sounds—or post-industrial, seemingly inspired less by rusted-out Northern English factories than the ominous throb of this century’s sprawling underground server farms.
im hole is as much about advanced sound synthesis as it is about self-revealing lyricism that sheds light on her trans experience, as well as reflecting on the whole notion of queer art. My experience of the album is very emotional, even voyeuristic, like a sonic diary with the most private entries reflecting on aya's personal struggles ("It's been four years now / I've been trading places / Evading faces / Saving graces / Elegiac susurrations bubble up / But if we grip we set the pace") presented in an excitingly futuristic sonic environment.
It may come across as braindance for the Web 3.0 generation, but the immediate reaction is physical, prompting an urge for body twists and breakneck moves. One of the centrepieces of the record, 'the only solution i have found is to simply jump higher', comes across like a manifesto. Riding on arpeggiated, trancey stabs, hyper-synthetic, kalimba-like synths, explosions of static, and eccentric humanoid utterances, it is one of those meditative peak-time head-turners. Disorienting and all-absorbing, there are not many existing coordinates in dance music to help us move around in aya's artificial soundscapes. Those who have come to love her deconstructed bangers and cheeky edits released as LOFT might find her new direction a tad too serious, even highbrow, but underneath the apparently more scholarly approach to music-making she retains her own sense of detached irony.
In the early '90s, a quarter-century after Roland Barthes famously proclaimed 'the death of the author', we witnessed a process of dissociation between dance music producers and their music. Anonymity prevailed over the charisma-driven charm of disco and house. The development of the information superhighway and influence of new cyber-aesthetics prompted this trend. Producers became part of the collective body – a single mechanical joint of the separate techno, hardcore and jungle machines. Artists would hide behind various monikers, exchanging different masks on a whim, and the notion of a pop star as a complete artist who might branch out into poetry, film or painting, as part of a single project unified behind a proper name à la Nick Cave, Madonna or Beyoncé, sounded almost blasphemous.
On debut album im hole, Aya (fka LOFT), surely one of the most captivating electronic producers to emerge from the UK scene in recent years, continues her boundless exploration of club-tuned sound design, while developing her presence as vocalist. The project stands as a singular work, imbuing themes of internal doubt and external pressure, questioning ideas of sexuality, gender and identity. It’s the marrying of Aya’s increased vocal presence, and her unrivalled approach to sound construction that navigates these thematic threads in idiosyncratic ways, neither wearing through obviousness, or alienating though opaqueness. There’s no wonder the album’s lyrics have been released as a book of poetry – new meanings are sure to be exposed in print.
But it is the symbiosis of sound and voice where the record’s unique perspective is most captivating; the broken, drunken beat of ‘once wen’t west’ where time stretches like taffy, the layered, pitched vocal following suit obediently. The line between poetry, voice and instrumentation is blurred with simultaneously reckless glee and knowing calculation.
The instrumental tracks reinforce the atmosphere of the record. The grime-adjacent charm of ‘dis yacky’ which ends up sounding something like an early Big Apple Records release, or the gorgeously harmonic plucks of ‘the only solution i have found is to simply jump higher’ that occasionally flirts with gurning acid lines, before altogether detuning itself to jarring effect.
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