Aural Aggravation

15th February 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

I’ll admit, of those who were highly anticipating the latest output from the ‘Chicago-based one-woman industrial army’ who is I Ya Toyah, I wasn’t among them. No-one can know all of the music, and it actually amuses me rather when obscurants give that stunned look or otherwise make like you’re utterly clueless when you haven’t heard of and aren’t into every ultra-niche act they are, as they make like the artists with maybe 1,500 likes on their Facebook page are household names.

For a cult / underground artist I Ya Toyah has a pretty healthy fanbase, but not enough to guilt me into thinking I’ve been living in a cultural void for however many years. However, the arrival of new single, ‘Out of Order,’ the lead single from the EP of the same title, is a proper punch. It’s a dark, brooding electropop affair with breathy vocals that suggest an array of emotions, and it’s accompanied by a disorientating video that’s pitched as ‘a surreal story of a gradual mental breakdown, caused by an isolation and misinformation fed by media’, which was inspired by ‘the film art of David Lynch and the pandemic’.

It’s probably fair to say we’re all influenced by the pandemic, our every thought and our every move – or lack of. Has lockdown made us more paranoid? Probably. Has revisiting David Lynch been a common and rational pastime? Probably. Lynch was twisting things before everything got so very twisted, and now, the twisted seems fairly rational, or otherwise makes sense as a metaphor for the present if nothing else. And this slow-burning tune fits nicely. It’s not an instant grab by any means, but then, nor has the impact of life in lockdown – it’s been creeping, cumulative, the result being a new kind of fatigue that’s certainly mental, but for many manifests as physical. What do you actually do with that? There isn’t actually much you can do, other than find solace in music. And that’s where I Ya Toyah comes in. ‘Out of Order’ speaks beyond what it says explicitly, and through her art, she captures something about these difficult and desperate times, and about the human condition more generally.

AA