Constructing Collapse Aya

It was all work that I had started about three years ago. The process of making it was that everything was finished, and then I went back and tinkered with it until I reached the limit of my computer’s processing power. I had to bounce everything to get individual audio tracks that I could then bring back in to mess with them again. This produces a really nice effect I call encapsulation. I see each sound or stem as existing in a dynamic relationship with each of the other sounds or stems in the track. This helps to create causality between elements but also isolates the function and placement of each sound, allowing me to reconsider the assumed hierarchies in dance music arrangement. So sounds exist in discrete environments, and collated environments create universes (i.e. the full arrangement of a track). Encapsulation becomes apparent to a listener when we manipulate the environment that a sound exists in; one of my favourite ways to do this is to rapidly shrink or expand a reverb space or delay line, collapsing the world inside the listening space.

I think so. I like to think that I pull the rug out from underneath people a little bit when I’m playing. I’m not a particularly meditative person. I need things to be immediate. Constant change is important; even more than that, it’s absolutely necessary. I can get really bored with DJs who do really long blends.

Technically, I consider yesterday’s performance to be deejaying because I’m playing and synching other people’s music with CDJs. But my understanding of deejaying goes pretty far from beat-matching two songs. Deejaying to me is getting from one piece of music to another. It doesn’t matter how you get from A to B: you can stop in the middle and talk or you can have five of pieces playing at the same time throughout. If you’re playing other people’s songs into each other, it’s deejaying. I’m not here to make a value judgement about what the best way to do that might be. There’s no point in being prescriptive about what constitutes a live set. My own are usually different from what I did yesterday. They do have the same kind of back-chatty, self-satirizing, dragging-the-audience stage persona—it’s a character that I’ve created for my performances.

I came up through dubstep. When I say dubstep, I mean DMZ, Tempa, Hyperdub: the original London / FWD>> sound. I started deejaying with vinyl when I was sixteen, going record shopping every week. Later I became disillusioned and frustrated with going to nights and setting up my Traktor Scratch. Something would go wrong with it or the booth wasn’t properly isolated… then I stopped deejaying altogether. I moved again and suddenly didn’t have anyone around me that deejayed. When I went back to it, I was playing a boygirl night, which is the party we run in Manchester, and I was going to experiment with my controller and a tape echo. It was at the end of the night and I was going to do a lot of slow jams, slowed down even further, but it wasn’t the right moment—it was Valentine’s Day. I had a ton of club remixes of slow songs with me and I ended up deejaying. I realized quickly that CDJs are really fun. There are all these additional options. To me, they’re much more flexible.

I’m a total theatre kid. My parents met at Drama school and I’ve been on stage since I was six years old, been in loads of youth theatres. I wouldn’t say I was pushed to do it by my parents, I just happened to be in these environments so it developed organically from there. I’m really comfortable on stage and I like to speak to other people. It took me a long time to realize that other people find being on stage uncomfortable. I didn’t get that people get up on stage and think about what to do with their hands or whatever. I never thought about that. When I’m on stage my purpose of being there is simply to just be. Whatever happens from moment to moment is a decision that I make in terms of my relation to the audience and what I want to tell them about myself in that moment. Performing and deejaying, I’m comfortable with both so I find it really easy to synthesize the two. They’re the two things I’m best at: playing this tune into that tune and stand on stage and say, you’re an arsehole, I’m an arsehole, haha, isn’t this funny, haha [laughs].

It’s an inflated version of myself. I’m not going to stand there and give a structural economic analysis or anything, but, at the same time, I’ll bring across some my political values. It’s important for me to remember that I’m a visibly queer person and that I have a platform to say things. I have found myself in many situations in clubs when I did not connect with the rest of the audience and the person on stage. That made me uncomfortable, and what made it worse was feeling that no one in the room gave a shit about whether I was comfortable or not. Clubs can be a really uncomfortable experience for queer folk. I don’t necessarily see it as a responsibility of mine to make people feel at ease, but I can do something to try and help make that happen. I might have a little go at them or poke and prod them a little bit, but I’m not trying to alienate the audience when I do that. Whenever I do that, I will always turn around and take the piss out of myself, to let the audience in on the joke, you know? It’s all about fostering that relationship, the dynamics between performer and audience. That’s really important to me.

When I’m in the UK it’s not an issue. I find if anything I slip into thicker versions of the couple regional accents that make up my voice, to heighten my stage persona. At the beginning of the set yesterday, I made a point to ask if people could hear me. I usually do this at the beginning of a set. You can only do so much during a soundcheck, but as soon as the room fills up and everyone’s chatting, things change. I never know how much the language barrier comes into play when I’m abroad. I get that certain slang doesn’t translate, but at the same time the rhythm of a joke is the rhythm of a joke. I can pull the fader down and just go, “how mandly dubstr am dinmm get blab blab bla? bejumbdnis! HAHA” and I know people in the room will laugh just because it feels funny. The simple fact of pulling the fader down and saying something in a certain cadence is funny in itself because it’s an absurd action in this context!

When it comes to deejaying, I will make a playlist with forty songs per hour. I probably end up playing three quarters of them. That gives me some flexibility but also prevents me from getting completely lost in my USB. As far as talking to the audience goes, that’s all off the cuff. I do have some bits like the shout-outs at the end that stay pretty much the same because they’re the people that I want to invite into the space more so than everybody else: people that are on benefits, that are struggling to make ends meet and maybe had to think about if they could afford coming to the club; all the queer people who don’t feel comfortable because there’s a bunch of big straight guys. I’m trying to reach people and tell them, I see you and I appreciate what you’re doing and that you’re here. Because it’s sick; it’s ridiculous that I get to do what I do for a living. And I don’t really make a living doing it [laughs]. But I know that I can’t do that if people aren’t there, so it’s important to appreciate them.

Well, it’s not so much a party as a collective, a queer collective. Everybody is extremely anxious and the whole thing is quite disorganized, so it’s difficult to get anything off the ground [laughs]. We do parties, but our focus is on collaborations. The bulk of our work is putting out edits and other original content. We’ve been working towards having a monthly party for a while, but it’s difficult to get it running. There are issues with finding mid-sized venues in Manchester. With most clubs you’re looking at a 500 quid up front—that’s money we don’t have, not even between the six of us. The clubs that don’t have to be paid in advance, have to be booked at least four months in advance. Even still for those venues you have to pay for the system and organize the sound engineer and the bar staff and the security and the lighting and shell out for all these different costs. There was a moment where we had a party in one of the gay clubs on Canal street. It went really well, but for some reason they never got back to us afterwards. None of us know why. They came up to us at the end of the night and told us, this is brilliant, we made loads at the bar, it’s a completely different crowd than normal, nobody’s been offensive…it’s just strange navigating the club scene as a predominantly genderqueer/non-binary/trans collective. On the one hand there’s the cisgendered homosexual spaces and then on the other there’s cisgendered heterosexual spaces and they’re such…

Absolutely! And in a way, they both completely support each other. There’s not a huge amount of separation between the two anymore. But still it’s easy to feel like we’re stuck in the middle between the two of them, but actually we’re neither here nor there, right?

Sure. I mean, to be cynical, they’re a really great promotional tool. They allow you as an artist to show people what your filter is. I take this thing that everybody understands and I show them what I do through the medium of that. There’s probably something to be said about living in a world with eight tabs open all the time on my phone or my laptop—this constant juxtaposition of high and low culture. Having access to all these different platforms, Facebook, Youtube, and what have you, it kind of gives them equivalent value. The border between high and low culture collapses if everyone has access to everything. The hierarchies collapse. MICHAELBRAILEY, a fellow member of boygirl, has done a lot of edits taking someone like Shawn Mendes and playing their acapella over with Ryoji Ikeda and other such things. It’s such a visceral description of the experience of living in today’s world where certain structures and distinctions have been broken down.

Yeah, I mean… I don’t know. When does something become an arts institution, you know? If we’re talking about Arts Council England—fuck no [laughs].

I played at Somerset House in London, but they have a fair bit of experience with bringing in club music or related events and shows. I’m on the NTS work-in-progress program at the moment and it’s been absolutely amazing. It’s an artist development program and quite a lot of the funding came from the Arts Council, but I haven’t heard much of larger arts institutions. I’m interested to see if that changes, though.

No, not at all. There are concepts involved when it comes to technical processes, like the idea of encapsulation I mentioned earlier. I’m trying to find ways to make Ableton function like an ecosystem of chaotically interacting elements, so I can hit play on one thing and it has a domino effect on four or five different elements. If you’re not working conceptually from the beginning, you work your way through it and at the end you realize what you were writing the whole time. I think about it in terms of ecology, that also means a personal ecology, negotiating different forms of identity. I’m twenty-six and am now just about becoming the person I am. From twenty-two up to twenty-six, that’s a difficult time for a lot of people, it definitely was for me. and departt from mono games is me wrestling with big questions about my own identity. Understanding my own psyche in terms of discrete, chaotically interacting elements (much like an ecosystem) has helped me to create not just a framework for my music but also my sense of self.