The second full-length album from aya, hexed!, is a dense and formally disorienting release that resists conventional critical framing. It can't be categorised by genre or affect; instead, it presents as an unstable system that attempts to function but is continually undermined by the conditions it has created. Across ten tracks, aya encodes states of addiction, gender dissonance, and psychic trauma into the very grammar of her compositions. But these are not addressed as simple lyrical content but as structure and logic within 21st-century sonic capabilities.
Released on Hyperdub, hexed! enters a catalogue long preoccupied with post-club atmospheres and emotional fragmentation, from Burial’s haunted garage to Laurel Halo’s queered voice processing. Yet aya’s work is perhaps the label’s most internally destabilized. The past does not haunt it. It convulses in the present. Its ghost isn’t memory but malfunction.
hexed! follows 2021’s im hole, her acclaimed debut, which blended experimental club music with hyper-processed vocals and autobiographical fragments, often mediated through gallows humor. While im hole played with queer performance and mirrored personas, hexed! is immediately more confrontational. Its affective atmosphere relies less on theatricality than on the corporeal, stripping the earlier record's reflective sheen for direct expression through instability. In doing so, aya stages a sonic exorcism that neither cleanses nor resolves. The demon is not expelled; it's looped.
From its opening, I am the pipe I hit myself with, hexed! signals a deliberate resistance to metaphorical allusions of harm or memory and an explicit invocation of addiction rendered at the level of sonic structure—the voice of trauma itself. This voice, however, is electronically flattened and detached, speaking of a “me-less” state. The track’s abruptness, at less than two and a half minutes, kicks hexed! off in media res, without buildup, context, or resolution.
This recursiveness becomes a defining feature of the album. Tracks rarely develop linearly. Many are rhythmically unstable. This is undoubtedly not club-adjacent music, but aya’s DJ background and former alias LOFT, inform her vernacular. While aya’s rhythmic vocabulary owes much to jungle, grime, and gqom, hexed! turns its back on the dancefloor. Club tropes appear only as half-memories, degraded beyond function. The club is a trauma site, revisited in glitch. The “deconstructed club” notion is there, but it's not aestheticist; it’s almost procedurally affective, with instability as an emotion, not a style.
Several tracks, such as off to the ESSO and Heat Death, use intense low-end pressure, erratic drum programming, and abrupt shifts in timbre to replicate states of panic, disorientation, or bodily distress. aya’s peers and predecessors, like Gazelle Twin, Lotic, SOPHIE, or Eartheater, have also explored themes of bodily transformation, psychological instability, and gender fluidity through their music. Where Gazelle Twin maps anxiety onto synth-punk textures, and Lotic explores gender dysphoria through fragmented noise, aya abstracts things even further, using signal degradation and looping edits to simulate psychic recursion, systemic malfunction, and cybernetic feedback. It's an approach that could be termed “cybernetic hauntology,” extending Mark Fisher’s conception of hauntology—the persistence of lost futures—onto the digital body.
In aya’s work, hauntology is encoded in a feedback system incapable of resolution. Her fragmented, text-to-speech voices, reversed samples, and broken vocal processing convey the feeling trapped in a malfunctioning interface. Notably, aya frequently codes her digital instruments, building plugins and VSTs that emulate broken or looping systems. The instability on display is not an accident. This is heard most violently in tracks like the names of Faggot Chav boys and droplets. These tracks are where particular identity fractures are made through pitch manipulation and spatial diffusion. aya’s vocal presence flickers across pitch and space. It is never stable but always there, mutating, disappearing, or doubling back. In this way, hexed! enacts a hauntological affect far removed from any incarnation of nostalgic retro-futurism. Its subject is ghosted in the mix itself. Think of the temporal drift of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, where memory becomes a looping feedback system, and the human presence is dispersed through voiceover, archive, and temporal distortion. As with aya’s use of the DAW, Marker’s editing was not a mechanism purely for storytelling, but for exposing the glitch logic of recollection and loss.
aya’s own positionality further complicates this spectral instability. As a trans woman, her manipulation of the voice and its pitch, grain, and placement can not be separated from questions of gendered embodiment and erasure. Like SOPHIE’s use of synthetic vocal textures to explore posthuman femininity, aya deploys technological mediation to articulate a form of dysphoric self-representation, destabilizing any feeling of identity as absolute.
Aside from posthumanism, hexed! also invites architectural comparison. Specifically, Bernard Tschumi’s “spaces of disjunction." With it, Tschumi argues that architecture gains meaning not just through its form alone, but through the incongruity between space and the events within it. In hexed!, tracks can be heard as spaces where surprise, rupture, and dissociation disrupt formal expectation. Each track becomes an acoustic threshold, where ambient lull collides with violent breakwork, and memory glitches into machine code. This architecture is most apparent in peach and Time at the Bar. The former introduces melodic, almost pop, motifs undermined by saturation and rhythmic derailment. The latter, which closes the album, ultimately fades into suspension, leaving listeners in limbo. There is no real climax or closure. The demon remains in the room.
There are moments of sharp humour, lyrical directness, and even pathos on hexed! The Petard is my Hoister stages self-deprecation as both performance and process. Using silence with dramatic effect invites a habitation of the track's space within the posthuman body. This emphasis on listening as a bodily experience is critical to the album’s impact.
hexed! is not really an album, but fractured emotional architecture soaked in repetition and signal bleed. It is also not an autobiography. Rather, it is an enactment of trauma’s temporality, addiction’s looping logic, and dysphoria’s disintegrating interiority. aya has produced an album that doesn’t describe instability; it performs it.
