DJ and producer aya sinclair, known as aya, traverses clubby sounds spanning from drill to jungle, footwork, and techno. Her critically acclaimed debut im hole (2021) brimmed with dreamy, textural, and percussive songs. She builds upon these chimeric sounds with the upcoming hexed! (2025), which she will perform songs from at Rewire 2025 accompanied by visuals from Marcel Weber aka MFO, marking a brave new step in her music. 

Ahead of her performance at Rewire 2025, we had a conversation with the artist. aya shares about the process and themes behind hexed!, how her relationship with club spaces has changed, and how her spontaneous lyrics act as a playful element in her methodic compositional process. 

On the Bandcamp page for your forthcoming album hexed!, it says that it “is about what happens when aya turns the lights on.” What ideas does the album touch on? And how do you approach darkness and light, in a sonic sense and a thematic sense, through your music?

this record is a fragmentary chronicle of learning to live in my own skin. the lyric writing process was one of learning how to stretch scar tissue, exercise weakened joints. i've been really drawn to working in altered tuning systems on this record, and finding deeper joy in novel synthesis methods – blurring further the perceptible difference between acoustic and digital audio. it's funny you ask about dark and light; i've been trying to complicate my predisposition to black-and-white thinking – trying to find the dark in the light and the light in the dark.

hexed! is framed, in some ways, in contrast with your last record, im hole (2021), particularly in relation to how it confronts elements of night-life culture you may have formerly romanticised. Can you speak about how it feels to share a release like hexed!, which seems to be a big moment of stepping into the light – or out of the hole – and making yourself visible in new ways?

it's certainly frightening! this is a very naked album. im hole was filled with lyrical obfuscations and compositional abstractions which held the listener at arm's length. i realise now that i was keeping myself at an arm's length also. where im hole had a desynchronous relationship with memory and experience in which each blurs into the other, hexed! takes an analytic view that holds the present moment in conversation with the past.

The first single from hexed! is the riotous ”off to the ESSO.” It moves closer to a pop sound, albeit still insatiably enmeshed with the gritty, bassy grime and club production that has been characteristic of your music. With the last question in mind, what is your relationship with club culture like now?

i don't go dancing a lot at the moment. i find public spaces noisy and deeply unsettling. with the benefit of hindsight, it's no surprise i developed substance habits to handle existing in the outside world. it's difficult to decouple club spaces and drug use, especially given how that pairing had become such an ingrained part of my identity. i've found club spaces much more tolerable when i feel stimulated by the music being played. i was really scared to go to bang face this year because it has consistently marked the height of debaucherous hedonism in my calendar, but i actually found it the easiest space to be in precisely because the music is so uh . . . stimulating.

In your music, the use of voice takes a prominent role, moving between softness and anger, and between poetic murmurs and demonic outbursts. Where do you draw influence from for your lyrics? And how does your lyric-writing practice relate to your production process?

my lyric writing process is much more guided by intuition than my production process, naive even. i think people assume i have a relationship with poetry, and like, sure, i know who gertrude stein is but i'm by no means a voracious reader. often I have a starting chunk of text that has materialised from some other sublime place which i'm completely incapable of manifesting. while my production process is one of very intentional construction, my lyric writing by contrast feels closer to chiselling a large block.

For your upcoming live shows, including your appearance at Rewire 2025, you are working with artist Marcel Weber, aka MFO, to present an audiovisual performance. What kind of images does your music summon? And can you tell our audience what they can expect at the show?

lots and lots of photons and even more sweat. i might throw up.


aya & MFO present an audiovisual performance on Friday, 4 April at Rewire 2025. Although 3-Day Passes have sold out, a limited number of Day Passes are still available via: rewirefestival.nl/tickets

Photos by Suleika Müller