KeiyaA live in Marseille

KeiyaA is an American artist and composer whose music blends deconstructed soul, jazz, spoken word and experimental electronics. Revealed by the album Forever, Ya Girl, she transforms intimacy into raw soundscapes where vulnerability, anger and tenderness coexist. She will be touring Europe to present her album Hooke’s Law, which pushes her blend of mutant soul, IDM and experimental electronics even further, in a work marked by ruptures and emotional exhaustion. KeiyaA is an American artist, composer, producer and performer whose work occupies a unique place in contemporary experimental music. Originally from Chicago and now based in New York, she has spent several years developing a deeply personal sonic language at the crossroads of soul, free jazz, folk, spoken word, ambient music and the most fragmented forms of electronic music. But reducing KeiyaA to a hybridization of genres would miss what makes her work so important: a rare ability to turn vulnerability, fatigue, anger and doubt into aesthetic and political material. She gained international recognition with Forever, Ya Girl in 2020, an album that became a cult favorite for many listeners in experimental music scenes. KeiyaA composes tracks that resemble songs as much as mental spaces. Her music operates through layers, dissonances, interruptions, broken harmonies, silences and imperfect loops. Voices overlap, crack and respond to one another. Rhythms appear and then disappear. The tracks often feel like thoughts taking shape in real time, without trying to conceal their contradictions or fragilities. This way of embracing emotional instability as an artistic structure strongly resonates with Black experimental traditions ranging from free jazz to radical American poetry, as well as with more contemporary forms of anti-pop and electronic deconstruction. Echoes of Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Meshell Ndegeocello can be heard in her work, along with affinities with artists such as Moor Mother, Arca and Tirzah. Yet KeiyaA cannot be reduced to a simple constellation of references: her voice has an immediately recognizable physicality and sincerity. Her queer identity runs through her work in a subtle but fundamental way. For KeiyaA, queerness is not used as a mere aesthetic or discursive marker; rather, it appears as a way of inhabiting the world, refusing rigid forms of narrative, relationship and representation. This can be felt in the way she composes non-linear tracks and blurs the boundaries between intimate confession and sonic abstraction, tenderness and tension, spirituality and chaos. Her music seems constantly to seek spaces where bodies and emotions can exist without having to conform to a stable or legible norm. She pays particular attention to states of fatigue, dissociation, care, emotional survival and collective repair, which strongly resonate with contemporary queer realities, particularly in contexts marked by social, racial and economic violence. This approach echoes an entire scene of queer artists and artists of color who use experimental music not as a cold intellectual exercise, but as a tool for emotional and political transformation. Her latest album, Hooke’s Law (2025), takes this approach even further. Denser and at times more abrasive, the album explores the mechanisms of tension, elasticity and emotional rupture — a direct reference to the physical law mentioned in its title. The tracks move between inner collapse and attempts at reconstruction, in a form of writing where digital textures, vocal harmonies and rhythmic fragments seem constantly to struggle against their own dissolution. KeiyaA's presence in a Dreamachine lineup makes particular sense, given how strongly her work engages with the project's DNA: an approach to celebration and music as spaces of disturbance, emancipation and sensitive experimentation. Like Dreamachine, KeiyaA rejects simplistic hierarchies between club music, performance, intimate emotion and sonic research. Her work opens up intermediate zones where the body can dance as much as think, drift, feel or get lost. In a context where many alternative scenes are increasingly shaped by the logic of immediate visibility and rapid consumption, KeiyaA instead offers an experience of slowness, deep listening and emotional complexity. Her music demands active, almost physical attention. It transforms discomfort, contradictions and flaws into territories of possible beauty. To invite KeiyaA is to invite an artist who does not seek to produce a mere show, but a presence. An artist whose music acts as a space of sensitive resistance, capable of bringing tenderness, rage, spirituality, abstraction and radical intimacy into coexistence. The rest of the lineup will follow this direction and be revealed in October.