What is Real? The Digital Selves of Vayda

Album Cover via Vayda/Instagram

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Miguelito is a senior reporter at Stone Turntable.

It’s become a bit rote to mention because of its ubiquitous influence on science fiction, but The Matrix (1999) is still fertile ground for contextualizing the remnants of what we call “the digital space.” That phrase is in quotations because it’s important to note crucial differences in our contemporary experience of the internet when compared to the Wachowski’s portrayal at the start of the millennium. While the film’s formal and set piece flourishes may never lose their potency, the spatial nature of the internet has been absent from most interactions with the technology since at least the early 2010s. The idea that you need a predetermined, physical location to access communication networks—like the landlines and phone booths the characters use to plug in to the Matrix—is obsolete. It’s a less potent image to link with a computer program that can kill you via Bluetooth. An obelisk-shaped plug, with visible wires and jagged metal, makes more sense and maintains an element of physiological horror that a small box you willingly carry around doesn’t.

Some of the philosophical concepts that were mined from The Matrix in the last two decades have become even more sinisterly muddled. Setting aside the directors’ encouragement to analyze the film in light of their closeted trans identity at the time of its production, it’s easy to see the ways in which their artistic vagueness led to co-option from the online far-right. “Redpilled,” the obvious one, isn’t just a part of the internet lexicon used to describe waking up from “the evil dream of wokeness.” For many it’s a shorthand for the loss of friends, family or community members to the embrace of reactionary politics. Other thematic considerations such as the nature of “capital-r” Reality and perception haven’t necessarily received the same treatment, but they do often deform into throwaway tools for the trite cultural critic or philosophy 101-level understandings that help feign intellectualism to coworkers or romantic interests.

It’s been two months since Vayda, the Atlanta rapper-producer, dropped VAYTRIX, her twelfth project since debuting in 2021. As the title implies, she’s using imagery from The Matrix as one component of VAYTRIX’s aesthetic milieu. The cover is a digital image of herself dressed like the series’ heroine Trinity—though with noticeably more jewelry—the background features the recognizable green binary code and a couple of the song titles are explicit references to characters in the movie (“lady in red,” “morpheus”). More compellingly, she’s revived some conceptual utility from one of the film’s popular, if stale, lines of dialogue. When Neo first loads into the training programs after being freed from the Matrix, Morpheus tells him that his appearance is the result of the “mental projection of your digital self.” It’s fine to use that phrase as your launch pad and make some point about psychology or Buddhism or gnosticism, but Vayda’s forays with regional genre conventions is an exercise in actually doing that—projecting multiple digital selves across her catalogue—and questions the possibilities and limitations of that framing.

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Vayda teases subgenres more than she has her sound dictated by them. She’ll employ a delivery reminiscent of Jenn Carter over a jersey club-drill chimaera from Noah Salem. Being from Atlanta, she’s well-versed in plugg but will speed up the punch-ins more than someone like WiFiGawd or Tony Shhnow, who prefer to ski over tracks. (She can do that too, especially when she collabs with the artists mentioned) It’s the distinctive flair and vitality she injects into subgenres—and her delivery—that allow her to get away with aging tropes. Saying she’s “conning and scamming” or riding “with a pipe” still sounds inventive and fresh. There’s evidence of her professed inspiration from HOOK, but I’m more immediately struck by her debt to Young Thug.

On crowd favorite “primadonna” from last year’s Breeze, she douses herself in honey but tells us “don’t help me, just help the bear.” That line’s immediately reminiscent of the content in Thug’s first verse on “Halftime” (“I like fish and water, I’m a bear”), parts of which are now enshrined in the official records of Fulton County. But that’s secondary to the formal playfulness they share, following impulse to conjure tangential references. Vayda has a leg up in the sense that she can self-produce her multiplying “digital selves” instead of collaborating out of necessity the way that someone like Gucci Mane and other Atlanta luminaries would lock-in with a single producer for a project. Power mapping her influences isn’t necessary though. Vayda states plainly on her tape with ATTNWHORE earlier this year, “I do what I want, they be callin’ it art.”

If Breeze had the zephyrous quality it suggests, Forrest Gump dialed into an aggressive streak and Dawn was an exercise in self-reliance—leaning into Vayda’s aptitude as producer—what “digital self” is VAYTRIX playing with?

While Vayda’s earlier projects have sharper edges, VAYTRIX smoothes out the contours. There’s a throughline that captures the initial appeal of her music—honest, propulsive, witty—while dabbling in instrumental palettes more recognizable to the casual listener. She’s not so insular on VAYTRIX and that’s reflected in the use of vocal features, which include MAVI, Zelooperz, Amindi & Na-Kel Smith. That’s not to say the sped-up sound that elevated her profile isn’t present, with “chaka” and “u still here” being the obvious examples. As she says on the latter track, “I’m going in spirals, my shit [creative arc] is not linear.”

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Vayda’s voice is noticeably less altered and spliced on this latest offering and she’s more confident in it. In an interview with No Bells last year, Vayda noted that her extensive vocal manipulation was due in part to insecurities about the recording quality of her early projects. “The song’s gonna go by so quick,” she says, “They’re not gonna notice all the flaws in the song.” Contrast that with her recent On The Radar performance of “afrovay”, which sounds almost exactly like the album version of the song. She’s overcome that hesitation whether through higher quality equipment or something more personal.

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Vayda’s influences aren’t as mediated by the internet on VAYTRIX and I don’t mean that to disparage her previous work. She’s been open about her experience in marching band through school and how that led to her taking music more seriously. In a pair of commentary tracks released on her Soundcloud a few days after the album’s release, Vayda tells how she molded the beats for “misdemeanor” and “skyy.” She discusses her love for Raphael Saadiq and Ahmad Jamal in describing how she found the skeletons for these instrumentals, but you can hear the marching band influence in the final product. Any group worth their salt could build a field show around the opening triplet of “misdemeanor,” “afrovay” and “skyy.”

Elsewhere on VAYTRIX we have “si, si,” which features the same bilingual playfulness that catapulted Ambjaay’s “Uno” in 2019, and the groovy “morpheus,” which gives space for a wordy offering from Mavi that hangs like incense near the end of the album. The album’s pinnacle though, if I may be so reductive, is “where tf beyonce at”. It sits near the middle of the album like a hypnotic whirlpool. With lines like “said some real shit, now I got a car” she reaches heights of relatability that the name-dropped pop behemoth can no longer attempt because of her distance from the average listener. There’s no need to mention the car’s make or model. (Vince Staples once said a Honda is still a foreign). Vayda’s flexes feel reachable, more like getting the deposit for a class-action lawsuit you forgot about than hitting a $20k lick. Through all of VAYTRIX she maintains the blunt emotional clarity that characterizes her music. If before she presented it to her audience as messiness, now she’s playing her cards straight.

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I tried to find the link to the Vince Staples tweet where he’s talking about a Honda being a foreign, but it’s either been deleted or search engine tech has become so shoddy it couldn’t be found. That’s indicative of an infrastructural problem affecting both historical records and contemporary artists like Vayda. The transient nature of digital media and the “ghosts” of artistic output feel ephemeral and that nothing sticks in the collective consciousness. That’s part of the reason why no publication with a “broad reach” (itself a troublesome framing) felt the need to review or do some small part to grease the wheels of reception for VAYTRIX.

The album is short—just twenty-four minutes—but its brevity shouldn’t dictate its reception and, for most of us, that’s only an 1/8th of daily screen time. If we wanted to we could pinpoint specific institutions and people to blame, but that’s not what this review is meant to encompass. In a better world, one where the arts—and their machinery of critical reception—aren’t seen as investment vehicles for the necromancy of private equity firms, Vayda and the rest of her musical cohort wouldn’t be treated as assets that could lead to a payoff for vampires who drape themselves in abbreviated titles. What we do in the interim and how we engage with the struggle that defines reception, is still important.

In November of last year, Vayda supported Ocho Worldwide in Los Angeles for the release of his album Top of the World. At one point, a few songs into her set, she asked which song the crowd wanted to hear. Someone yelled “primadonna” and, after considering it, she decided to perform “TEN,” to which the requester shouted, “That one’s good too!” That might be the best heuristic for presenting Vayda’s music: list her tracks and say “That one’s good too.”

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