Dreamachine Festival - KEIYAA live * BROODOO RAMSES

KeiyaA is an American artist and composer whose music blends deconstructed soul, jazz, spoken word and experimental electronic music. Discovered through the album Forever, Ya Girl, she transforms the personal into raw soundscapes where vulnerability, anger and tenderness coexist. She will be touring Europe to present her album Hooke’s Law, which takes her blend of mutant soul, IDM and experimental electronic music 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 and the most fragmented forms of electronic music. But reducing KeiyaA to a hybrid of genres misses what makes her work so important: a rare ability to turn vulnerability, fatigue, anger and doubt into aesthetic and political material.

Revealed internationally with Forever, Ya Girl in 2020, an album that has become a cult favorite for many listeners in experimental music scenes, KeiyaA composes tracks that feel as much like mental spaces as songs. Her music works through layers, dissonances, interruptions, broken harmonies, silences and imperfect loops. The voices overlap, crack and answer one another. Rhythms appear, then disappear. The tracks often feel like thoughts taking shape in real time, without trying to hide 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 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 instantly 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 emerges as a way of inhabiting the world, of rejecting rigid forms of storytelling, relationships 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 easily legible norm.

She pays particular attention to states of fatigue, dissociation, care, emotional survival and collective healing, which strongly resonate with contemporary queer realities, especially in contexts shaped by social, racial and economic violence. This approach echoes a whole scene of queer and racialized artists 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), deepens this approach further. Denser and at times more abrasive, the record explores the mechanisms of tension, elasticity and emotional rupture—a direct reference to the physical law evoked in its title. The tracks move between inner collapse and attempts at rebuilding, in writing where digital textures, vocal harmonies and rhythmic fragments seem constantly to struggle against their own dissolution.

KeiyaA’s place in a Dreamachine program makes particular sense, given how her work speaks to the project’s DNA: an approach to parties and music as spaces for disruption, emancipation and sensory experimentation. Like Dreamachine, KeiyaA rejects simplistic hierarchies between club music, performance, intimate emotion and sonic exploration. Her work opens up in-between spaces where the body can dance as much as think, drift, feel or lose itself.

At a time when many alternative scenes are becoming increasingly shaped by the logic of instant visibility and rapid consumption, KeiyaA instead offers an experience of slowness, deep listening and emotional complexity. Her music calls for active, almost physical attention. It transforms discomfort, contradictions and cracks into territories of possible beauty.

To invite KeiyaA is to invite an artist who does not seek to put on a mere show, but to create a presence. An artist whose music acts as a space of sensitive resistance, able to bring tenderness, rage, spirituality, abstraction and radical intimacy together.

The rest of the program will follow this direction and be revealed in October.

BROODOO RAMSES | global club - footwork, jersey club, baile funk, ballroom rhythms & rap

Broodoo Ramses is an artist, DJ and producer based in Paris. His musical approach is eclectic, energetic and syncretic, aiming to build strong bridges between electronic, Black, queer and popular music.

Between underground parties, fashion weeks and radio shows as part of his residency on Rinse France, Broodoo Ramses is beginning to make a name for himself in Europe and around the world. He aims to extend his influence and creative horizons even further.

Organization: Dreamachine

Dreamachine is a platform for showcasing and creating work by queer artists and their friends.

https://www.helloasso.com/associations/dreamachine