Go With The Flow: aya on her Counterflows shows

For someone who thinks very deeply about music, Aya Sinclair’s approach to preparing for a live performance is surprisingly ramshackle. Speaking to us from her South London flat, the DJ and producer – better known as aya – is in the process of pulling things together for an upcoming performance at MUTEK festival in Barcelona in just a few days. “I'm fairly used to being quite last minute,” she laughs. “I sometimes write tunes in the green room and then play them half an hour later.”

And it appears that the same last minute approach is also being taken for her upcoming performance at Glasgow’s Counterflows festival – taking place in venues around the city from 31 March-3 April. In a late addition to the programme, it was announced that not only will Sinclair be DJing at the festival’s late night club event at Room 2, she will also be performing live at the festival’s closing party, alongside her close friend and frequent collaborator Iceboy Violet.

“I think we're going to be working out how we're going to do it up until the week before, of course, but it’s definitely something we want to do more of,” she says. “This could all change in the space of a week, but from where we're at now it's going to be that there will be a set within a set, basically. There will be a handing over of the microphone, and we'll have a bunch of Iceboy stuff as well.”

Having known each other from their days living in Manchester and as part of the queer DJ collective boygirl, the pair worked closely together on aya’s debut album, im hole, released in October last year via Hyperdub. During the making of the album, Sinclair was heavily influenced by the writing of Sadie Plant, specifically her 1997 book, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture.

“There's a few consistent narratives that come back time and time again, and each time they come back a bit more context is given to them based on all of the things that have happened around them,” she says. “So you get this sense of weaving taking place in the writing… and you're recognising all of these loops that are happening around you as you're reading it. It's absolutely magical.”

Such was the book’s influence on her, Sinclair adopted a similar structure for im hole, which was released with an accompanying clothbound book of lyrics, poems and photographs, designed in collaboration with Oliver Van Der Lugt. Just like Plant’s book, each element of the album gives meaning to another and our understanding of it is constantly shifting as a result, making each listen more thrilling than the last.

“Stitching and weaving is something that comes up time and time again in the lyrics, but it's also finding ways of creating this sort of patchwork in my production,” she says. “I reuse the same sounds quite a lot, but just the processing that I put on them is super different.

“While my music can maybe come off quite complicated or disorientating, most of the stuff that's on the record is incredibly simplistic,” she adds. “Most of the tracks are three or four elements really, and it's about the way that things are combined or the way that things are arranged… I think making a point clearly and simply, and coming to an odd conclusion about things based off that is something that's really valuable to me.”

There’s one particular recurring motif on im hole that we discuss: the repetition of the phrase ‘red shoes, blue shoes’, spoken in an almost frustrated and confused tone that appears across the album. To one ear, this might suggest some sort of internalised identity struggle, but, in fact, Sinclair tells us that it is merely a vocal warm-up she picked up while doing some voice training sessions, and its inclusion on the album is a way of forcing herself to actually practise them.

“There is the nice thing that it's kind of walked backwards into being about an indeterminacy of identity,” she says. “These things get meaning attached to them… and sometimes the answer is as stupid as they're just vocal warm-up phrases, but that doesn't invalidate that reading of it… Also, she gave me a sheet of like 35 words and phrases, and those are the ones that I picked.”

With Sinclair, you get the sense that the cogs are always turning. Whether intentional or not, her work feels incredibly intricate and considered, with hidden gems scattered throughout for the listener to unpack in a manner of different ways. And, even if it’s only been thrown together in the few days, hours or minutes before, you can always expect something special.

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Counterflows takes place at various venues across Glasgow, 31 Mar-3 Apr

Late Night Counterflows: Bonaventure, aya, and Ira, Room 2, Glasgow, 2 Apr
Still House Plants, aya featuring Iceboy Violet, and Jana Rush, The Ferry, Glasgow, 3 Apr

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