“When it comes to trauma, I think you can see both sides of an event,” explained DJ and producer Aya Sinclair, known mononymously as Aya, in an interview with tQ earlier this month. “You come around on the other side of something and then understand it as necessary for creating the person who you are.” The trauma – and resulting perspective – in question is the subject of the London-based artist’s challenging but thrilling second album hexed!, an abrasive mix of techno, UK bass, noise and industrial. Something of a re-examination of the nihilistic partying charted on her debut album im hole, hexed! sees Aya grabbing the tendrils of emptiness from her previous work and pulling them, shrieking, into an examining light.
hexed! starts with an ominous ring of electric guitar. “Where to begin? Where were we before?” Aya has been upfront about making the album in a place of newfound sobriety, where she is confronting her past substance abuse. “I used to say some shit for sure,” she chuckles – then goes in, screeching, raving and chanting, possessed. The title of the opening track is ‘I am the pipe I hit myself with’, and her beats are as streamlined, hard and metallic as that sounds – the perfect instrument of self-destruction. By the end, these processed beats somehow transform into skittering drumsticks dropped on a snare, like humanity coming to from a substance high: “I’ll never let myself forget / They had me out on a witch-hunt / When I found myself”.
If ‘pipe’ is the prologue, then lead single ‘off to the ESSO’ drops us in media res as self-abuse plateaus. “Under no circumstance could I ever go home” she promises, as acid-washed beats pump out from the club she’s just fallen out of. Three and a half minutes of unhappy hardcore cover endless nights cycling through the same routine of clubs, drugs, alcopops, afters, lucozade and sleeping on someone else’s sofa. Its variations are screeching and headache-inducing but, tellingly, more straightforwardly thrilling than anything on im hole. ‘off to the ESSO’ signposts the inevitable, but is honest about the lure of the partying cycle – a perspective which is perhaps only possible once it’s been broken.
Further down the spiral, ‘heat death’ is a woozy document of the space between life and death, with Aya taking something like comfort from the possibility of ultimate destruction (“No more death knell / no more ‘time will tell’”). In ‘ESSO’, her words and actions were dictated by the cyclical rhythm of the club, but here her own psychology seems to warp her physical surroundings: she describes the walls pulsing, as her beats swim like a hungover head. The architecture of her production has a limitless, reality-bending quality that – much like SOPHIE before her – feels inextricably linked to her transness. On ‘navel gazer’, she takes chopped up sirens, airhorns, phlegm and scratched drum’n’bass CDs and rearranges them into a gleaming amalgamation of extreme highs and lows. The track sees her reckon with her pre-transition self, and also showcases her confident switches between rapping and half-spoken lyrics, which share a conversational directness – and particularly dark Northern sense of humour – with her friend and frequent collaborator Iceboy Violet.
hexed! reveals Aya as a master of sound design, functioning as both a storytelling tool and as a descriptor of emotion. The last minute of ‘heat death’ sees the final electronic pulse go out, leaving the sounds of car wheels whooshing through rain-soaked asphalt. The track drops underwater at the very end, like a soul sinking to the ground, then soaking into a puddle as life continues without them, a dark joke. Aya’s voice is absent for the title track, on which she builds a sculptural altar of drone and feedback, her pain and dread physically palpable. The more minimalist ‘peach’ approximates the hard-soft of BDSM using whips as percussion, contrasted with gentle electronic pools in which Aya’s quieted voice floats, tentatively. Her processed screams are layered with too-perfect harmonies, in avant-garde mimicry of nu-metal vocal dynamics.
As is often the case, the confrontation of recent trauma turns into an examination of earlier manifestations. On ‘droplets’, Aya remembers an instance of teenage vice “down dogshit alley”: “You followed me down a guinnel / Swaddled in my dank habit… I quench my thirst with poison”. Her whispered vocal tone and the beats vibrating underneath are confessional but seductive – again, she’s showing us the slippery relationship between pleasure and pain, past and present. The ASMR-adjacent soft industrial of the track is reminiscent of mid-’90s Nine Inch Nails or ‘Inertia Creeps’ by Massive Attack. As the album progresses, Aya continues to play with references from her years as a teenage nu-metal and emo fan, as an act of de/reconstruction rather than regression – something she has in common with other experimental artists of her generation like Moin, Claire Rousay and Klein.
This culminates on closing track ‘Time at the Bar’, on which Aya ramps up the horror, screaming indecipherable metalcore vocals over increasingly relentless compressed beats. Now, all the seduction is gone, and all that’s left is a flatlined nightmare that just cuts off, no warning. It’s telling that after journeying through Aya’s addiction and past, she leaves us on this note. She can understand it, can view it from both sides, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone. hexed! is both a difficult and rewarding listen because it’s such a true portrait of the way trauma sticks to us, even if it’s sometimes dormant. You can never really lift a hex, after all.
