aya – hexed!

Bounded by the sheathed noise and strained elocution lessons of ‘somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor’ and ‘backsliding’ – which arrived through personal backstory at something akin to a communal mission statement, as she uttered in plainspoken fashion amid the footwork, grime and other deconstructed club phantasms ‘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’ – her debut album im hole apparently wasn’t acrid enough for aya, with her new outing hexed! described in the Hyperdub record notes as a stark manifestation of ‘what happens when aya turns the lights on’.

That track ‘backsliding’ which drew the curtain on im hole discussed her heartrending departure from Manchester and a scene built up around the dilapidated auto repair shop turned experimental music venue The White Hotel which provided a sense of home, as aya embarked on a music career surrounded by fellow scuzzy noisemakers and genre misfits like Rat Heart, Iceboy Violet, Rainy Miller and Blackhaine. Yet if that period proved formative it was hardly easygoing, as hexed! spends a good chunk of its time looking back on an intense and disorientating spell of drug addiction and panic attacks.

So from the relatively sober and summatory execution of ‘backslide’, the first flurry from hexed! features fierce vocal deliveries which lie somewhere between crass punk caterwaul and the barking cries of someone who is suffering a nervous breakdown in a supermarket parking lot. After pondering ‘Where to begin?’ the album opener ‘i am the pipe i hit myself with’ offers various iterations of the shit she used to say before outlining suggestively how she got bewitched, while the withering and sexually frustrated ‘peach’ makes a terrace chant out of the phrase ‘Never slept through the night’ amid thwomping electronics and the odd scatting accompaniment and the first-look single ‘off to the ESSO’ pushes and pulls between Manchester and London while embedding the vernacular of the north, which apparently hasn’t changed too much from my own upbringing in Yorkshire as aya mimes the quintessential put-down ‘you’ve dropped your fucking gay card’. Through bleached or reddened eyeballs, one way or another aya makes you look.

The wilting and whispered intimacies of ‘peach’ mark a shift in the album, with the crunchy, grimey and microwave-blasted techno of the earlier tracks plus the combination of anxiety-laden cries and depersonalised robotics ceding to a broader musical palette. The menacing and magisterial title track ‘hexed!’ is an instrumental which features what sounds like a guzheng or some other plucked zither over scudding feedback. If that first run evoked the precipitous angstiness of Blackhaine or the dried-down club deconstructions of SOPHIE, with ‘hexed!’ we hew closer to the recent guitar distortions of Klein, while the album notes with some justification also refer to the doomsday dancehall of Kevin Richard Martin, the cybernetic maximalism of the South Korean artist bela who blended industrial throbs with pansori arias and other traditional folk motifs on Noise and Cries and the Sunn O))) and Ideologic Organ curator Stephen O’Malley among other touchstones from Eyvind Kang to nu-metal.

‘droplets’ which revisits ‘the teenage memory of a sad November in Yorkshire’ blends lurching dubwise rhythms with gamelan-style percussion as aya shifts further away from the jargonese and psychoanalytic breakthroughs of im hole, now melding hushed whispers with more conventionally sung passages. Her voice variously calls to mind Enya, Sinéad O’Connor and Fairport Convention while the overall effect summons up the tripping heave of the nineties classics ‘Army of Me’ by Björk and Adore by the Smashing Pumpkins.

Foregrounded throughout the perilous and poisoned course of hexed!, on ‘navel gazer’ her voice sounds especially bare as she stands with a hand up her schnoz and in an act of naked admission unfolds the hopeful yet somehow forlorn lines ‘Stability was missing. But then I found you and down here we can brew that post-nuclear family fission’.

Careening between nostalgia and contemporary politics on a track which emphasises rasping guitars and delirious electronics like a funhouse ride gone off the rails, at the heart of both ‘navel gazer’ and hexed! is a lovelorn tale of shaky trust and misplaced affection, sagging situationships, blue balls (or blue vulvas) and the cruel vice of codependence. But there is some room for solace as birdsong breaks through the murk and mire, an epilogue to the elegant drones of ‘The Petard is my Hoister’ before ‘Time at the Bar’ amid watery bluster proves an electronic blowout, wiping the slate in the manner of a squeegee drawn brusquely and squeakingly across a fogged-up and overwritten window.