The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.
Before aya became one of the most fascinating new figures in experimental music, she thought she knew what her future held: A semi-detached house in the countryside, some kids, maybe a dog or two; a quiet, traditional kind of life. Obviously, things didn’t really go to plan.
Now aged 31 and based in South East London, the Yorkshire-born artist spends most of her time touring. The few days she has off are mostly spent holed up in her Peckham studio “frantically writing” her uncanny, abrasive collages, like the ones found on her second album hexed!. Released in March via Hyperdub, hexed! is a bewildering journey through pummelling electronic noise with only the occasional functional club loop, pop structure or ambient passage.
Across the fleeting, glitching instrumentals, aya speak-sings, screeches and doom-metal growls about the torment of addiction: powders, scuttling to the next afters, the subsequent bedroom-bound days. Built around fragmented nocturnal poems and Notes app mementos, her lyrics are a singular form of word play, slotting together double entendres, regional dialect and in-jokes, a process she likens to solving a jigsaw puzzle.
The title of the record draws on aya’s interest in witchcraft – she talks at length about Silvia Federici’s 2004 text Caliban and the Witch and the parallels between the early modern period and now – but it also references something closer to home. After finding a community through a Pentecostal church aged 16, aya says she was kicked out when her peers started to clock that she was queer. “I thought I could hide it,” she tells me, from a park near her studio. “I’d been smoking weed a bit before that, but that was when [I started] getting baked all day, every day.”
The impact was strong. “Searching for community in different places and ultimately being thrown out of them … really did a number on me,” she continues. “Running from myself for years and years and then coming out as trans and transitioning and all of the crazy alienation from your own body that comes with that. You know, being pushed further and further into dissociation despite slowly attaining a vision of yourself that makes sense.”
aya spent her formative years experimenting on cracked Ableton software with her dad, playing the drums in bands, and skateboarding. One of her earliest memories is being gifted a sample pack CD for her birthday; she’d spend hours splicing and looping drums on the computer. “I’ve been that kid ever since, to be honest,” she smirks.
Drawing on her “arty” parents’ music library and the piracy services of the time, aya would listen to everything from Slipknot and My Chemical Romance to Aphex Twin, Digital Mystikz and scores for Jonathan Glazer films – a breadth that has no doubt shaped her restless, genre-crushing style. “I get really bored by sterile sounding music,” she tells me. “I like things that breathe.”
I get really bored by sterile sounding music. I like things that breathe.
After the church incident, aya found her people when she moved to Manchester in her twenties, specifically during a fateful taxi journey to The White Hotel when the conversation turned to Dean Blunt. For the four years she lived there, she became enmeshed in this Salford-orientated music community that also included fellow underground experimentalists like Blackhaine, Space Afrika, and Iceboy Violet. She released music under the alias LOFT for several years, but around 2019, chiming with her birth name change, she decided to start fresh. She adopted her current name and released her debut album three years later.
While 2021’s im hole explored the murky world of substance-fuelled benders and alienation from oneself in claustrophobic detail, hexed! reckons with the aftermath. “What happens when we start to reintegrate back into the body? And what happens when the dissociation isn’t an option anymore, and the only thing you can do is reintegrate all of those horrible little worms that are squirming around in there?” she asks out loud. “I guess the record is just like: I have been hexed in some ways. Here is how I lift the curse.”
Revisiting such a traumatic period was hard work, aya says. At the point of our meeting, she’s been nine months and – she checks her watch – two weeks sober, a long process which started while she was working on hexed!. Today, she sips from a can of Trip in lieu of a pint and speaks extensively about herbal tea and wholesome hiking trips in Wales. “Diving back into those places and forcing myself to sit there to be able to describe the kind of minutiae of whatever was happening at the time or, you know, my emotional landscape […] is an insane thing to do to yourself. It’s like inducing your own therapeutic trance [just] for the purpose of being able to write a record,” she says, wide eyed.
“But we got through it, you know? And it has been genuinely therapeutic.” It’s not something she’d like to make a habit of, though: aside from performing the tracks live each week, she said she has no interest in sitting and listening back to the record — at least for a while.
Along with the big lifestyle changes, aya’s creative process has evolved over time to focus on finding her own voice after LOFT’s exercises in genre-study and existing production techniques. “I was like, OK: I’ve done a bunch of research and now I want to take what I’ve got and consolidate it into something that is my perspective on things rather than just imitating what other people are doing. I think you have to learn how to do things right to learn how to do them wrong,” she says. It’s not about “breaking the rule per se, but playing with it.” And where im hole was created in a fugue-like state, the new aya is determined to make music with intention. Yes, she’s still confronted with the late nights and vices that come with touring, but this time she’s doing it with a level head.
“This is my job, you know?” she says. “So all of the rest of my interactions with the world need to be measured around how I can have enough energy to play these shows. I used to spend so much time burnt out, laid on the sofa. To be on the other side of it and see a burnout coming, like, I’m going to spend the next three hours just laid here, staring at the ceiling as a preventative measure because I know what’s coming. Having that kind of foresight, that kind of self-awareness isn’t possible being constantly pissed.”
The difference from the former aya she’s described is certainly stark: these days, driven and settled in her unsettledness. That early vision of suburban bliss – something she admits she held on to long after it stopped making sense for her – has not been replaced with a new narrative. “Instead, I’m just allowing things to be chaotic, in the way that the world is,” she says, before smiling knowingly. “It’s the typical kind of AA phrase: One day at a time.”
It’s a feeling she encapsulates on the closing track of hexed!, a kind of warped paean to her hometown. Around a rampage of guttural shrieks, thrashing electronics, and local field recordings, “Time at the Bar” climaxes around a neutral third – a microtone that is not happy, not sad, but somewhere else – suspenseful. “It has this feeling of the open expanse of the sky and terror, but also joy,” aya continues, with a quiet confidence. “And it’s meant to communicate that feeling of: there isn’t a narrative anymore, there’s just open space. And that’s terrifying, but it’s also completely freeing.”
