A discordant noise whirs through the speakers in the opening to Manchester-born musician Aya Sinclair’s debut album, im hole. The artist formerly performing under the alias LOFT has a knack for the unsettling. She dislodges and disorientates the listener with fragmented sounds and sentences that come off as static jolts of rhythm and noise. As a performer, she stretches and contorts her body to unlikely proportions with deranged glee – a theatricality that only bolsters the sense of uncanny.
On im hole, autobiographical vignettes are stripped to bare phonetics. “Red or blue,” Sinclair asserts like a computational demand in the opening track “somewhere between the 8th and 9th floor”. On “what if i should fall asleep and slipp under” she whispers, “Come over, we can fuck the void out of each other”, against an eerie display of dissonant piano notes and abstract electronics. It’s the same dissociative feeling you would get at a 5am afters, before you drift off into a woozy, hypnagogic sleep.
Elsewhere, JPEGMAFIA returns with a glitching fourth album, Tricky introduces his Lonely Guest project, and Ross from Friends shares a euphoric full-length release.
