We’re pretty confident about slapping the “AOTY contender” badge on this one: aya’s second album hexed! is out on Hyperdub next week, and it has blown our tiny minds to pieces.
The South London artiste joined us in the No Tags “studio” to reveal the pills, thrills and bellyaches behind the phenomenal follow-up to 2021’s im hole. We talked about shaking off the curse of drink and drugs, embracing her teen metalcore past, putting worms in your mouth in the name of Art, and just who is the best aya on Discogs?
We also debated donk as worship music, her plans to be the next Prince, and of course her favourite film.
Dive in – but before you do, final call for No Tags with Paul Woolford at AVA London tomorrow! We’ll be joined by AKA Special Request for a conversation at 1pm in the British Library’s Knowledge Centre. Taganistas get a 20% off code. Skive work and pop down? We’ll have a few No Tags books for sale too.
Some more housekeeping: the second pressing of our book, No Tags: Conversations on underground music culture, has landed. If you missed out the first time, head to Shopify to place your order.
A reminder of the Local Action x Clasico party at the swanky Tate Modern Corner Bar on 4 April, with ELEANOR, E.M.M.A. and Tom Lea himself. Grab a FREE ticket from RA.
And on 22 April, Chal will be speaking to music writer Ian Penman about his wonderful new book, Erik Satie, Three Piece Suite, at the LRB Bookshop. Alas, we’ve just noticed it’s sold out! But if any more tickets pop up they’ll surely be on Eventbrite.
If you’re enjoying No Tags, that’s just GREAT. We really love making it. Why not rate, review and subscribe on your podcast app of choice? We’d also ask you to consider subscribing to our paid tier, which costs £5 a month and helps us continue bringing you these regular podcasts (and it gives you a discount on our book.) Now on with the show.
TL: Before we get into the meat of the album – and there’s a lot of meat – I’d quite like to talk about the process of making it. From what I understand, making albums can be a pretty brutal process for you. Is that fair?
A: It's an arduous process, yes.
TL: Psychologically and physically. So let's talk about what the journey of aya making an album is.
A: It's not a lot of sunlight. That's for sure. It's a lot of Huel – that’s a lifesaver. Because I get very hyper-focused. I'm very obsessive. And so I can quite easily spend eight hours uninterrupted in the studio, and then get to the point where I'm EQ-ing a kick drum and crying and I'm like, why am I crying? It's just a kick drum. And I'm like, oh, I'm hungry. And having a little pouch of stuff that I can go to [really helps]. But as for the process of writing a record… I tend to start from a place of trying to work out what's come before in my catalogue and how that sits in dialogue with the continuing narrative that I'm trying to share.
CR: So it’s a bit of a reaction to what you've previously done? Is that how you feel about it?
A: Yes, for sure. I really wanted hexed! to sit in conversation with im hole and address a lot of the same themes, but from different perspectives. I think a lot of the beginning of this record was thinking about starting with a sound palette, starting to build out more music, musicologically trying to work out what different sound worlds I'm bringing together.
As I was getting going, I had this thing of ‘hardcore to hardcore’ – so hardcore as in oom-tish oom-tish [mimics a kick and snare pattern] and hardcore as in screamo. And trying to find the commonalities between those worlds to meld them together into some kind of new world, but something that feels quite familiar at the same time.
CR: How different is that to how you made im hole? Is that a similar process?
A: im hole was definitely a lot less intentional. I had five pieces of music that I knew were album tunes that weren't going to go on an EP. And I knew that I needed to do an album soon. I just had the sense of that in terms of where I was at in my career.
TL: So they were tunes you were originally making in isolation, and then it was like, oh, there's this thing forming?
A: Yes. And then it was like, OK, I’ve got a sense of a kind of topology of this. When I wrote 'what if i should fall asleep and slipp under’, I was like, this is the second track on the record. I just know that. There was another track I was working on where I was like, this is the eighth track on the record out of 10. Now I just need to knit it together, as far as the arc of the record is concerned. This record has followed a fairly similar process, but at the same time it's also unveiled itself to me as I've gone along. I've been thinking a lot about cyclical structures a lot, which comes up in the record too.
The middle track of the record, ‘hexed!’, the title track, is designed to be the polar opposite in energy to ‘The Petard is my Hoister’, which is the second to last piece of music. They're both built around similar compositional principles. They both work with altered tuning systems. They both have a chord with a single plucky thing over the top. But one of them is the absolute pit of despair, and the other one is total lightness. So thinking about those kinds of balances throughout the record, there are also pieces of music where there are two things back to back, and they're describing the same thing but from different angles. So thinking a lot more about narrative has definitely been more of a focus on this record.
TL: Did you find it easier or harder to make than im hole?
A: It's difficult to say. With im hole, I was puzzling through and not quite sure what I was doing. With this, I've known what I was doing the whole way through. But because the subject matter is quite dark, and because it's a very sensitive record, and because I've been more in myself, more present inside of my head, it's been more difficult to force myself into the place of actually making the thing rather than just having it rattling around in my head.
TL: It must be a difficult headspace to get into at times. You’ve said that it's a more naked album than im hole, and substance abuse, and situations that specifically relate to that, is a key theme.
A: There's a poem on the back of the vinyl edition that sums up the narrative of being someone who does a lot of drugs and drinks a lot and then getting sober. In writing that I was having to cast myself back into the place of going afters-hopping and whatever. That really rocked my shit for a couple of days afterwards, where I was like, I know that I don't want to do this, but because I've had to inhabit that mindset there's a kind of method [acting] relationship that I have to have with my own memories, which is really, really bizarre. There’s a feeling of being unstuck in time, and shifting backwards and forwards through different iterations of who I am. It's a whiplash for sure.
CR: On im hole, I was struck by was this sense of it being an investigation into your own mental state. And in particular, the curious mental state of taking ketamine, and the kind of absurd humour that's part of that, potentially the slightly profound cosmic weirdness that might come up. It always felt to me like a really striking attempt to put that experience into something aesthetic, which is something few people have ever achieved – it’s not something that's made it onto record very clearly before, not in a narrative way.
It seems to me that this record is about the darker side of those experiences, but also as if it goes further back. There's much more of a lyrical puzzle to be solved, for me. What would you want to give people as a bit of narrative framing about that?
A: I think it's an exploration of why I might have come to have substance issues, and the need for space from the world, the need for space from your own psyche, and the recursive loops that you get stuck in because of that. I mean, it's insane that drugs and alcohol make you that much more sensitive to the things that hurt you in the first place, which drove you to using drugs and alcohol to try and escape something.
Im hole is basically like: these are the insane things that I experienced in my living room between 2020 and 2021. That’s really the text of the record. And hexed! is like, OK, how did we get to 2020 and what happened afterwards? Trying to fold all of that in. There's a lot of jumping around in time that comes with that. I’m eager to express that with the 'hardcore to hardcore' theme. Hardcore in the oom-tish Bang Face sense is something that's relatively new to me. I didn't get into big stompers until like 2019. But metalcore has been with me since I was 14 or something. So realising that there are these commonalities… there's a kind of representation of these different wormholes in time, things echoing into the future and back into the past.
CR: I think [closing track] ‘Time at the Bar’ is particularly interesting. The lyrics stick out to me as being these quite melancholy signifiers of normie life. There's references to double glazing and shag pile carpet. Can you tell me about what that means?
A: ‘Time at the Bar’ is like letting go of an idea. I’d held this narrative in my head for so long about going away to university and then coming back home, back to the village where I grew up, and starting a family. I think that's a fairly common narrative for a lot of people. And it took me so long, through all of the different things that have happened in my life over the last 10 years since that, to let go of this image.
So ‘Time at the Bar’ is basically written as a series of toasts. It’s like, we're seeing it off. We're observing these things. We're observing the beauty in each of these small things. But then at the same time [we’re observing] the ways in which they're kind of repugnant and there's a kind of toxicity to them.
CR: Because it's not just shag pile, is it? It's shag pile around the cistern.
A: Yeah, those little rugs people have in their bathroom?! [Shudders] Crazy mode. But as much as it’s a kiss-off to those ideas, it’s also a sense of liberation from it as well. Because although the uncertainty that comes with no longer having a narrative is frightening, actually recognising that as freedom… you know, it's the wide-open sky.
CR: We have to talk about the worms. Tell us about putting worms in your mouth, and why that is this album’s cover?
A: They feel like soba noodles. It's totally chill.
CR: But it’s not totally chill, it can’t be totally chill.
A: It's kind of fine! It's good till they start moving.
TL: So why the worms?
A: Well, the cover of im hole was this open hand with detritus, just a bunch of stuff from the floor of the park. This hand with garbage reaching out of the void. That's kind of how I feel about the record. It's just like, this is the stuff that I have to offer. Why is the hand red? Don't know. Let's not question it.
I wanted to continue the theme of it being my body. And it makes sense with this being such a shouty album by comparison, right? I wanted it to be my open mouth screaming, but I don't think the screaming thing really comes across because I’ve got worms in my mouth, but that's cool.
On the work-in-progress SoundCloud playlist I had for the album, I had a picture of the inside of my mouth that I was using. Everyone was like, yeah, it's cool, but it's the cover of a mixtape. It's not an album cover. So I had to do something kind of disgusting, that fits the disgusting nature of the subject matter of this record: worms. Yes. It was just the obvious thing to do.
CR: I had another question about worms. What's your longest running earworm that’s always in your head?
A: Jesus, there are so many pieces of music that I'm cursed to remember all the lyrics to. Lots of them are by the Bloodhound Gang. Lyrics to songs that I learned when I was nine.
TL: How many Bloodhound Gang songs were you learning?!
CR: You had the album, is what you're saying.
A: No, older family members had a copy of the Bloodhound Gang’s album Hooray for Boobies. That’s the album that has the areola of a nipple around the centre hole of the CD, and it says ‘insert your tongue here’, so when you do it looks like a nipple. I mean, talk about packaging design.
So the Bloodhound Gang catalogue is in there. Lots of Odd Future. Again, it’s things that I thought were clever with words at the time and appealed to a juvenile sensibility. These are the things that I'm cursed to remember.
TL: So I believe you once said to me that you have four albums in you, and then you're going to pack it in because you can't go through the process anymore, and you're going to become a mastering engineer or something less strenuous. Is that still the case?
A: Maybe, I don't know. I respect people who continue to just release music every three years for the rest of their life. I mean, I love Prince. His discography was 38 albums I think. [40, actually!]
CR: This idea of you stopping and being like, you know what, I'll just fade into the background and master a few records by other people, seems not right to me. That seems sort of unlikely.
A: I mean, I love Scott Walker. But he did have the wilderness years.
CR: So you fancy some wilderness years?
A: What if I do an inverse Scott Walker? Make four very difficult, very demanding records, and then just come back with some easy listening bangers?
TL: im whole, but with a W this time.
A: Nice. Yeah, there we go.
TL: We want to talk about you as a live performer. But before we do that, I want to bring up two things you did the last time I saw you play live [at LCMF 2024, in Hackney Church], simply because I think they were really good and should be documented for posterity. You opened by playing a piece of music by every other Aya listed on Discogs [45 in total], all played over each other at the same time. And then you closed with a medley, which was a second of each of these Ayas played one after the other.
A: Yeah. This show went through many different iterations. I was going to do a PowerPoint at one point. I might go back and do a tier list.
CR: Who’s your favourite of the other Ayas?
A: Tough call. Ayako Saso was a video game music composer for Namco. She worked on Street Fighter. She did a bunch of stuff for Dance Dance Revolution. Incredibly cool. And then her and her best mate who started working at the same company at the same time, in the mid-aughts, after working together for 25 years, just did a series of gabber 12”s under the name Sampling Masters AYA. They're all amazing. There’s so many fun little stories. ‘Wifey Riddim’ is sampled from an artist that's called Aya too.
CR: You’ve done a lot of versions or iterations of what your live performance can be, if you include DJing with a mic as well. I get the feeling that, on one hand, you’re trying to keep things interesting and not just do the same old performance that anyone would do. But there's also a sense of trying to ramp up the intensity of it, or even the vulnerability or confrontation, to make it more scary for yourself even? Trying to put yourself in a more risky position as a performer.
A: In which situation?
CR: Well, for instance, DJing with a mic makes you instantly vulnerable because you have to say things and perform. But then coming up with gradually more elaborate live shows that are based on your increasing skill as a performer… It seems to me that there's a bit of an increasing level of challenge being set.
A: Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, I get bored. I get really, really bored. I don't like playing the same show twice. I try to avoid it. Playing live is not a static thing. You have to match whatever you're doing to the situation that you're in. I think performing live electronics in club spaces is always fucking weird anyway because there's a bizarre attention demand that you have on the audience in a place where they're maybe not trying to pay attention to stuff. B
ut then simultaneously, if you're playing the same set in an 11PM curfew kind of situation, there’s an expectation that everyone is watching you the whole time. So there’s no way that you can play exactly the same show at both of those things. It's always this sliding scale between ‘nobody look at me’ and ‘everyone look at me’, inside of the same set. You have to be really careful about how you pace that within the set as well. People need time to talk to each other.
TL: Did you always get on the mic when DJing?
A: I've stopped doing it recently. I started after seeing N-Type DJ when I was about 16. He used to MC his own sets. I remember him wheeling up a tune and saying, 'Yes, bad one, this!’ I thought it was hilarious, but it worked. Everyone was screaming, and I thought, 'Why not do this?' But it’s not something I've always done, I definitely learned to DJ first. I spent a lot of time learning how to do long blends on vinyl before transitioning to CDJs and screaming at people.
TL: I want to go back to that church gig, because you put forward a theory that is absolute No Tags catnip in my opinion: a direct lineage between ancient religious music and donk. I’d like this on the record.
A: I mean, if we work from the present backwards, donk is an amped-up Korg M1 organ sound, right? It's a staple of house music. But the need for a sampled organ? Gospel music. Obviously, gospel has its roots in church music. Sarah Davachi once described the organ as 'the speech synthesiser of God’… I really hope that was Sarah Davachi and I haven't misattributed it. But there is this overwhelming force of the almighty in a congregative setting. With donk, it's squished. It's so compressed and processed.
CR: Yeah, so much God in one split second.
A: So much God.
CR: It's a good theory. I watched the talk you did for Noods, and one thing I picked up on was that you said you need a band. It does seem like the next obvious step after this record.
A: Yeah, I think that's what I'd like to do.
CR: What would be the minimum viable product for a band? What other people do you need to make the right sound? Would you be on drums?
A: See, this is what I wrestle with myself over. I need to roll around on the floor and climb over tables. That's really important to me. You know, going back to Prince, he would take over from [the Revolution’s drummer] Sheila E...
CR: He was playing a lot of instruments.
A: And dancing. So, who knows? Maybe there's a Revolution-sized ensemble I can take around with me. Fifteen players or something ridiculous. But definitely live drums. Live drums are very important. Some kind of baritone instrument that's maybe a fish out of water. A bari sax would be amazing, just because it honks. I'm not trying to do a noodly math-rock three or four-piece, but I would really like to start incorporating live instruments.
The difficulty is that the acoustics in many club spaces are terrible, which makes doing anything with live instruments difficult, especially drums. I mean, when Death Grips were touring towards the end, Zach Hill wasn't playing any cymbals because of all the high frequencies and reflections. He's playing a snare drum with the snare turned off, a floor tom and a kick drum. It's just about keeping it completely dulled down. I find that reaction to 'we've tried this, and it's not working, what can we change?' quite inspiring.
CR: So on im hole, the soundworld was quite clubby, with lots of dance and grime signifiers. Now you've moved into the hardcore-to-hardcore spectrum, and this palette of gnarly, metal-coded, even screamo sounds. Obviously your vocals evolve to meet that. I was wondering how you think about your voice as an evolving instrument alongside sound design and composition. Did you have to learn how to scream?
A: It was something I did a lot as a teenager. I didn't just play drums in bands. I also did a lot of electronics, which meant doing backup vocals and unclean vocals, like screamed vocals.
CR: Oh, while the main singer is doing the sweet singing?
A: Yeah. It's pretty fun. That's something that's been there for a long time, but I definitely learned to do fry screaming completely the wrong way, blowing my voice out. The process of relearning how to do that is easier now with YouTube, but it's hard to internalise that stuff fully as an adult. My impulse is to do what I've done for half my life. I'll play a show and blow my voice out halfway through the set and then wonder what to do for the rest of it.
But as far as vocal delivery decisions, they're pretty instinctive. I know it has to sound a certain way for the music to make sense, so I do that. I do worry about being able to replicate it live, but so far it's been fine. I did mime during a set recently, which was quite fun. No one seemed to notice.
CR: You mimed because you realised you needed to protect your voice?
A: I mimed because the acoustics in Berghain are terrible. We were getting crazy amounts of feedback on the singing mic, so I decided to throw in the backing track. It has the same effect. The audience can't tell. Where's the lie?
TL: I’ve interviewed people in the past who've said that one of the reasons they do press is that it forces them to confront their musical intentions, and they often find it quite illuminating to vocalise these things. So I was actually just wondering how you find the process of doing interviews about these albums – talking to multiple people on a press run about really personal records?
A: The process of doing interviews is pretty enlightening. You're forced to really examine your intentions behind making stuff. And while I’m quite intentional in my writing, there's always stuff that bubbles up that you don't realise you're addressing. But then, after a certain point, things become formalised, and you find yourself giving the same answers repeatedly. I don't know. There are decisions that can be made at that point, right? Do you just start lying? Was it Helena Hauff that does that? Every interview she slips in a little lie. Someone told me this. Maybe this is my lie.
CR: OK, final question…
A: I’ve been dreading this.
CR: Recommend us a film. Are you a film person?
A: I like movies! I had 10 years out from watching movies because I didn't have any way of watching them that wasn't a laptop, so I decided not to watch films instead, which in hindsight is a very me decision to make. I really shot myself in the foot with that one because there's so much I've missed.
I think a lot of the movies I really love come with pretty intense content warnings, so I'm cautious to recommend them to anyone.
CR: I think maybe… fuck it?
A: Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. Watched that recently. That is a deep film. It's absolutely fantastic. It's a really excellent exploration of generational trauma, repressed sexuality… it's real fucking nasty. The performances are fantastic. And it made me really want to get a Burberry trench. So there we go. That'll do her. Otherwise, Monsters, Inc. That's your cute option. Both films about loss, I guess.
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