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aya’s music is a dizzying tunnel system of itchy scratches, whispered needs, fried zaps, and unsettling sounds so tactile they appear to virtually puncture your eardrum. At occasions, the London-based experimental producer’s debut, im gap, resembled gothic ASMR, or an open-heart dissection of a DAW, utilizing tiny scalpels to tug aside, pinch, and rearrange sound layers. aya’s first solo launch in over two years, Lip Flip, is a fundraiser for her facial feminization surgical procedure, nevertheless it’s additionally a celebration. The place aya’s early tunes reimagined future-pop like SOPHIE as music for dissociation fairly than dancing, this EP sounds constructed for a disorienting membership night time.
There’s a screwy buoyancy to those songs that makes Lip Flip really feel like a fusion of im gap and her extra adrenalized 2023 collab EP with BFTT, the co-founder of their label YCO. aya’s elements usually really feel so characterful and thoroughly chosen as to look anthropomorphic: vivid dings that appear to smile, metallic synths winking like they’re enjoying patty cake. On “Essente!,” Ugandan rapper Ecko Bazz somersaults between flows and languages, his fierce vitality reworking aya’s spasming beat right into a neon playground. The title observe, which options her alter ego LOFT, ratchets up stress with the tight pulse of a Two Shell track after which explodes right into a barrage of abrasive but groovy low finish primed to jolt dancers into off-kilter motion.
The most important change on this EP is the near-absence of aya’s voice, which acted as a sort of phantom tour information by way of im gap’s haunted manor home of deconstructed membership. Missing her characteristically surreal imagery and slurred rhymes, these tracks really feel barely extra nameless, as if any oddball with a knack for madcap sound constructions may’ve patched them collectively. There’s additionally much less of the unfavorable area that made the hypnotically menacingsongs constructed round her creaky vocals and industrial bleeps sound like spoken-word poetry for a scary sport rating. With none type of narrative to cohere round, Lip Flip typically hits like a faceless flood of wonky sound shards—chipmunk gurgles and kawaii-ified chants on “Leftenant Keith,” clipped breaths and thudding drums on the title minimize.
However even with its frenetically pristine sheen, the music continues to be cheekily bizarre, the rhythm all the time shifting. Just like the ’80s British band it’s named after, “Dexxy Is a Midnight Runner” is a tribute to an ADHD remedy: lisdexamfetamine (generally generally known as Vyvanse, apparently a favourite on the membership circuit in Australia, the place exhausting medicine are troublesome to acquire). However its lattices of paranoid plinks and progressively eerier cut-up vocals are virtually the inverse of Dexys’ ardour pop. The ultimate part’s fusillade of rubbery percussion makes me image a single tiny tablet sprinting at cartoonish pace like Loopy Frog. Whether or not the music is demented or danceable, aya’s killer ear for tone and texture makes each fragment sound hyperreal.
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