Ayria

Wikipedia:

Ayria is a Canadian futurepop/synthpop musical project formed in early 2003 by Toronto's Jennifer Parkin following her departure from the influential futurepop and EBM band Epsilon Minus. The lighter, ethereal side of gothic, her work shows a collage of smooth textures and soft vocals over collisions of bass and driving beats, danceable and melodic with the darker elements and themes of electro-industrial music still present.

Biography

The first Ayria album, Debris, was released on Alfa Matrix in 2003.

Debris garnered international attention and produced several club and rave hits (notably "Disease"), and a series of successful mini-tours in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, occasionally featuring Mike Wimer of Noxious Emotion on drums. It shows a heavy EBM influence and features diverse tracks with Parkin singing about personal life, sci-fi themes, and surreal imagery.

During this period, Parkin performed guest vocals for several other projects, including Belgium's Aïboforcen and Implant, and Mexico's Isis Signum, some of which she would return to later on, such as the late 2011 release of two songs with Aïboforcen.

As touring for Debris wound down, Parkin began writing music for the second Ayria release on her own, with production assistance from Joseph Byer, of v01d. 2005's Flicker reflected a much more diverse and distinctive sound, with many tracks borrowing heavily from minimal techno and early EBM acts such as Nitzer Ebb. It was a very personal reflection on her own favorite music and interests and how Ayria situates into the overall gothic and industrial scene.

In late 2005, touring for Flicker commenced with several Canadian dates, a UK Festival (Interzone in Cardiff, the first European performance by Ayria), and a U.S. West Coast tour. 2006 saw many more opportunities for Ayria such as a first ever European tour in November as well as a debut performance in Osaka, Japan. As of 2008, Ayria was continuing a full United States tour as the supporting act for The Crüxshadows. She has played important and successful shows at DragonCon amidst an impressive lineup with such luminaries as Sir Patrick Stewart, most recently in 2011, and has also performed with the seminal EBM/synthpop band VNV Nation.

The first two songs by Ayria since the release of Flicker included "The Gun Song", featured on the compilation Alfa Matrix - Re:connected [2.0], released in August 2006 and "Six Seconds On All Sides" released on Dancing Ferret's Asleep By Dawn compilation in fall of 2006. The third full-length album, Hearts For Bullets, was released on September 12, 2008.

Hearts For Bullets is a carefully produced album with many new ideas and shows Parkin’s production abilities rising to a new level, with experimentation in textured and overlaid sound elements as opposed to minimal beats. The EBM influence still shines, but more texture and rhythm of her own design emerges alongside it, and her vocals show increasing variation, sometimes maintaining the girly sound she often uses as a characteristic of the lighter portion of her sound, but also playing with vocal synth and modifiers as well as other stylistic tones in her singing itself. With some electroclash elements and reflections on modern life and its relationship to technology and twisted darker edges, the album tackles school shootings a bit like a concept album. Parkin aptly notices that the phenomenon, which has sometimes been blamed inappropriately on gothic subculture, is tied to deep problems in contemporary life and larger social forces. Her music attempts to rise above violence with hearts, the target of shootings, as opposed to bullets, offering meaningful social ties, giving a fairy tale like quality to the increasing complexity of her work. Her usual contrasting style of soft and light on top of deep and heavy is still present, but there is the addition of multiple layers of sound on each side of the equation, showing considerable evolution in the structure and composition of her songs, while the writing is also more thematically focused around a similar set of elements and concerns.

Parkin herself studies math, and her work shows intricate structures of sound in relation to physical events, as though music is at the heart of what the world is made from, much like Plato’s suggestion that both music and nature are mathematical in construction. On “Cutting”, the experience of self damage takes the form of the music itself reflecting both pain and its overcoming, encapsulating the theme as though it is itself made of music, her tempos driving in sharp contrasting time like a cut.

Her work is interesting from the standpoint of feminist studies, as she often deals with themes reflecting the relationship of women and the notion of femininity to music, darker gothic concerns, and overall culture and work life. She continually points out problematic injustices which one must rise above, with art as a method for doing so, and music as a release that always transcends spatial and material boundaries of life. “Red Shift”, for example, captures the scientific phenomenon which happens over vast distances, in terms of a song, while other songs become more personal. Thus, she is an artist who advances themes of human nature, creation, and moral justice with gothic culture becoming a vehicle for dealing with the darker side of those issues.

All of her albums have thus far come with double CD versions available that feature a collection of remixed tracks and other inclusions such as side projects and covers.

Ayria's fourth full-length album, Plastic Makes Perfect, is currently in production.

Name

Parkin has stated in at least one interview that the name is a play on one of her favorite words, "aria", as in the melodic operatic form of singing and composition, but pronounced "area," because music has spatial properties. She once playfully suggested in her blog that AYRIA is an acronym for "Awesome, Yeah Really, I'm Awesome," but her emphasis on carefully constructed melody with ethereal vocals does recall the derivation of her stage name from classical music.

Touring Members

Ayria has performed with various band members for her live performances, characterized by her enthusiastic and spontaneous dancing punctuating her singing, which have included Shaun Frandsen, Mike Wimer, Joe Byer (v01d), Jeff Mielitz, Justin Pogue, and Kevin Toole.