aya’s music is a dizzying tunnel system of itchy scratches, whispered desires, fried zaps, and unsettling sounds so tactile they seem to almost puncture your eardrum. At times, the London-based experimental producer’s debut, im hole, resembled gothic ASMR, or an open-heart dissection of a DAW, using tiny scalpels to pull apart, pinch, and rearrange sound layers. aya’s first solo release in over two years, Lip Flip, is a fundraiser for her facial feminization surgery, but it’s also a celebration. Where aya’s early tunes reimagined future-pop like SOPHIE as music for dissociation rather than dancing, this EP sounds built for a disorienting club night.
There’s a screwy buoyancy to these songs that makes Lip Flip feel like a fusion of im hole and her more adrenalized 2023 collab EP with BFTT, the co-founder of their label YCO. aya’s ingredients often feel so characterful and carefully chosen as to seem anthropomorphic: bright dings that seem to smile, metallic synths winking like they’re playing patty cake. On “Essente!,” Ugandan rapper Ecko Bazz somersaults between flows and languages, his fierce energy transforming aya’s spasming beat into a neon playground. The title track, which features her alter ego LOFT, ratchets up tension with the tight pulse of a Two Shell song and then explodes into a barrage of abrasive yet groovy low end primed to jolt dancers into off-kilter movement.
The biggest change on this EP is the near-absence of aya’s voice, which acted as a kind of phantom tour guide through im hole’s haunted manor house of deconstructed club. Lacking her characteristically surreal imagery and slurred rhymes, these tracks feel slightly more anonymous, as though any oddball with a knack for madcap sound structures could’ve patched them together. There’s also less of the negative space that made the hypnotically menacingsongs built around her creaky vocals and industrial bleeps sound like spoken-word poetry for a scary game score. Without any sort of narrative to cohere around, Lip Flip sometimes 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 cut.
But even with its frenetically pristine sheen, the music is still cheekily weird, the rhythm always shifting. Like the ’80s British band it’s named after, “Dexxy Is a Midnight Runner” is a tribute to an ADHD medication: lisdexamfetamine (commonly known as Vyvanse, apparently a favorite on the club circuit in Australia, where hard drugs are difficult to obtain). But its lattices of paranoid plinks and progressively eerier cut-up vocals are practically the inverse of Dexys’ passion pop. The final section’s fusillade of rubbery percussion makes me picture a single tiny pill sprinting at cartoonish speed like Crazy Frog. Whether the music is demented or danceable, aya’s killer ear for tone and texture makes every fragment sound hyperreal.
