As far as album titles go, Embrace is the one. Released by Superpang earlier this year, Lauren Sarah Hayes’ new record is a giddy, all-in celebration of improvisation, offering four tunes that let loose, with glee, on the systems she’s set in place. Using the electronic equipment she has been building for over a decade, it resembles one of her free-form performances; through glitch, churn and squelch, the music suggests the way she moves about live, the rapid movements she makes across the stage to fix one sound to another, or the near-choreographed dances she has while developing her noisescapes. In true Hayes fashion, the music is an absolute joy, a genuinely exciting 20 minutes focused on discovery. It’s described by Hayes in the briefest and least illuminating of terms: ‘bodily/worldly processes, improvised ecosystems, sensual synthesis’. There’s not much to it that you’d enjoy more if it were explained.
Hayes has an idea of noise, and abstract sound, that is quite glorious. It exists with euphoria in mind, with the responses our body makes to experiencing music. It has a lot in common with clubbing: growing up, Hayes would hang out at Glasgow’s local goth nights, before slowly moving into the harder stuff, discovering electronic music through DJs playing techno and drum ‘n’ bass. She moved between the scenes in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and was inspired by the clashes she heard in club tunes, speaking of sounds that were ‘bright and harsh’, full of colourful dissonances. She loved the way this kind of dance music ‘spewed out’ its structure – between the beats, and within the textures, producers were making a mess, bringing chaos to logic. Hayes’ music is profoundly influenced by this time in her life, enshrined with the jerky movements made on the dance floor. ‘I would dance every weekend for years, and I completely remember the connection dancing had to every individual sound – as if each one was connected to how I was moving my body’.
Hayes’ music really sounds like that. It’s as if she’s been fortunate to find every stray tone that’s wandered into her music, each unexpected millisecond of her improvisation a unique bit of viscera worth throwing your hands up for. Her music not only feels this physical, but is created physically, her performance linked directly to the body. Known for frequently using ‘haptic’ instrumentation, Hayes treats her electronic equipment the way an improviser might treat their guitar, or saxophone, reaching for techniques with a hands-on approach. At the heart of her set-up is a PS2 controller: when you watch her live, you can see her using the joysticks to direct the travel of sound, or button-mashing towards an unforeseen collision. Her 2019 performance Moon via Spirit is a captivating example: when she uses her synths, or goes to her laptop, it’s as if she were mixing, the freely-floating noise guiding her like a beat would a DJ.
Moon via Spirit is a wonderful example of what you can, for lack of a better word, ‘expect’ from Hayes’ music. At times it has that ‘brightness’ that she’s described, with trippy, upwardly pitched vocals that resemble a fragmented PC Music cut, and nauseating frequencies that rise up through the improvisation before disappearing. Her hands-on approach can also be ‘harsh’, and in a joyful way: out of moments of relative calm, where skittering beats play without accompaniment, she builds up jittery layers of sound, some that you’d hear exploding out of the PA at an experimental noise show, and others that could almost do a job as cloud rap beats.
Some people call it techno, because Hayes’ music has at least sounded like it before, hinting at it with kinetic rhythms and recycled phrasing. When her music gets genre-tagged, it tends to be a speculative move, an attempt to categorise something that can hint at structure before disregarding it. Claiming there’s ‘pop’ music in there, for instance, feels like a way of telling you about a specific moment that Hayes has unravelled while improvising. I can tell you about the strands of vocals that jump out at me from “Xeon”, the lead track from her new record Embrace, and how they’ve ended up playing in a loop in my head. In reality, the track is a full-on exploration of this voice, taking it and stretching it beyond compare, letting consonants hiss and blur as others bounce against melodies. The clang and bleep of her 2016 record Manipulation has stretches of tangibility, building rhythms and promising pulses before disappearing from underneath them. Cohesion is just as likely as it isn’t.
These moments are triumphs, though, because they’re discoveries, moments in which Hayes’ curiosity delivers findings. It’s worth noting that you’re not listening to a traditional album when you listen to one of Hayes’: an artist who eschews composing, her records document the same live improvisation you find at show, albeit with the scenario and its setting removed. ‘I feel very awkward about recording my music, because it’s a continual thing. It’s never done. I don’t feel that it ever needs to be.’ For her, improvisation is a way of extrapolating something; since it exists in collaboration with people, and settings, and scenarios, it’s hard to see why it should be finished by the artist at hand. Sound is dynamic; albums are weird. And for Hayes, it’s not even about her: ‘I don’t really understand the idea of self-expression in music – I’ve never been interested in that’.
In performance, Hayes has nothing but ulterior motives. She’s interested in ‘exploring how we understand the world, and each other’, placing emphasis on the latter. Much like club culture, where our movements are a collaboration, our dances communal, Hayes sees live music as a shared responsibility, with audiences and performers as vulnerable to the situation as one another, moving through the unknown together. ‘I see improvising as a way of being with people – a liberated space that we can co-create’, she says, a rebuttal of the way we often perceive music, as an explanation of the self. The scenarios she performs in are as new to her as they are to us – watching any number of her live performances, you can see Hayes hearing things for the first time. Moving between the components of her instrument, she performs a ritual of responsive upkeep, editing and embracing the emerging sounds.
As a collaborator, Hayes is all barriers down, inviting artists and non-artists alike to bring their own skills to the fore. She’s been collaborating her whole career, and believes in the very real influences that come from outside of her music – it’s not just other creators that count, but people and places all over – the spaces, and communities, that invisibly influence sound. New combinations are found in many different forms, from her recent attempt at interrogating a more traditional performance space with visual projectionist Kendra Sollars (whose background projections are featured in the images on this page), to taking her music into mine shafts and national parks. All of it is collaboration, once you start breathing air.
Hayes has also worked to bring electronic music to those unfamiliar, introducing it to newbies through the freeing non-discipline of improvisation. In 2015, she led Sound, Electronics and Music, teaching 900 children to perform graphic scores with handheld synths, collect sounds using portable recording devices, build DIY instruments, and more. The project points back quite directly to Hayes music: the sessions were hands-on and based on prompts, rather than outright instructions, giving new musicians the freedom to find out. The way Hayes teaches music is, in this sense, quite similar to the way she approaches collaborative projects: ‘I try to facilitate a space where everyone is comfortable bringing their own skills, cultural background, identity and aesthetic approaches’, she says, encouraging a kind of learning that’s done in exploration.
It’s about finding out along the way, and like any good noisemaker, I feel comforted knowing that there’s a ripple of defiance in how Hayes approaches her music. This is, after all, not how you’re supposed to operate, to work outside of the assumed schematic of construct, compose, release. Even in the more progressive composer world she finds herself adjacent to, Hayes’ improvisational approach makes her an outlier: ‘Numerous institutions and people have told me that I can’t do what I do’, she says. Informed by the radical music she found herself dancing to week in week out, her music thrives in opposition, calling for new ways of exploring sound together. ‘I love going into situations where my work doesn’t quite fit and seeing what I can make of the situation. What can I learn and teach maybe. You have to be bold, and stubborn, and at the same time generous, and open’.