Artist Statement

Self-Love Songs is the latest phase of Yayas, an evolving bedroom synth and live audiovisual project rooted in experimental electronic music. This project traces its origins to a deeply personal process of recovering and reworking my family’s analogue video archive. Years ago, I began rummaging through boxes of old tapes and reels—converting them into digital formats not only to preserve them, but to engage with them creatively. I was struck by the dense textures of analogue formats, the flickering imperfections, and the way physical decay told its own stories.

Through this archival work, I discovered a fascination with the materiality of memory—how moments degrade, survive, or mutate over time. In handling these analogue materials, I came to appreciate the sheer tactile richness they offered compared to the flat sheen of digital media. These early experiments evolved into a broader, ongoing multimedia practice that combines modular synthesis, analogue video, and performance. My tools include semi-modular and modular synthesizers, software synths, drum machines, and my own voice. I’ve developed an interest in analogue video synthesis as an expressive counterpart to electronic sound: a real-time, non-rendered visual language that bypasses typical animation workflows in favor of embodied feedback and signal translation. The resulting visual textures mirror the audio ethos of my practice—immediate, unstable, intimate.

In 2025, I began composing Self-Love Songs, a cycle of genre-bending experimental tracks created as a form of emotional processing. The project was born out of personal grief but quickly became a celebration of resilience, community, and healing in my chosen home of Spain. These songs emerged during a period of deep reflection, and they operate as sonic affirmations—gentle reminders of the certainty of love and connection, even in the midst of loss and disorientation.

The LP is marked by extreme dynamics and emotional contrasts: quiet/loud, tender/intense, melodic/dissonant, dark/light. Each track offers a different kind of encounter—with the body, with memory, with belief. Some arrived like lullabies. Others took shape as dancefloor awakenings. Collectively, they form a constellation of self-repair: a fractured but determined map of survival.

My compositional approach is grounded in sonic exploration and intuition. For this project, I’ve been especially focused on the Moog ladder filter—a cornerstone of subtractive synthesis, known for its warm saturation and tactile low-end response. Across several tracks, I explore the regions of sub-sonic frequency that are more felt than heard. These frequencies are crucial not just sonically, but thematically: they draw attention to what is absent, what leaves, what can only be perceived through its trace. Silence, void, and disappearance are recurring motifs in both the audio and visual components of the work.

Self-Love Songs resists easy categorization. It draws from a wide array of sub-genres and influences, reflecting my own nonlinear path through sound and identity. You’ll hear traces of IDM, alt-R&B, lo-fi house, techno-pop, electro-gospel, experimental club, and ambient soul. Some tracks flirt with traditional song forms, while others splinter into noise and abstraction. “Alright” blends 60s soul inflections with lo-fi house textures, while “Rock N Go” merges Middle Eastern tonalities with retro-futurist electroclash. “Another Day” is a maximalist synth miniature, and “A Capella” strips everything back to the voice as both subject and medium. “I Believe” closes the LP with an anthemic, distorted mantra—imperfect, holy, and unapologetically hopeful.

The voice is the throughline across all these variations. Sometimes dry and naked, sometimes heavily processed, the voice functions not just as melody but as instrumentation, rhythm, and emotional architecture. In live settings, it becomes a site of vulnerability and experimentation—looped, pitched, glitched, or simply held.

The audiovisual performance version of Self-Love Songs is equally central to the project. I am developing a system of real-time interactions between audio and video using control voltage techniques and instruments such as the Moog Spectravox. These instruments allow for deep synchronicity between sound and image, enabling the visuals to respond directly to the contours of my voice or synth modulations. This method builds on vector synthesis—a technique within analogue video synthesis that utilizes oscilloscopes, vector monitors, and CV-controlled signal routing to draw shapes and gestures in response to sound.

Unlike pre-rendered visuals, this live A/V method emphasizes presence, relationality, and improvisation. It proposes an alternative to hyper-polished, transactional digital aesthetics—a way of using technology not as an effect or spectacle, but as an extension of the body and its emotional frequencies. The visuals become a conversation partner, not a backdrop: a co-performer in the unfolding of each song.

Throughout the LP and performance, I strive to highlight the small moments—the stutters, the dropouts, the silences, the distortions—as equally expressive as melodies or beats. These minor details point to larger questions: How do we form and reform identity through sound? How do we relate to our own voice, especially when it feels broken or uncertain? What does it mean to hold space for softness, doubt, or repair in a culture that often demands resolution?

Self-Love Songs is not only about healing—it is healing in process. It does not offer closure or answers. Instead, it offers attention: to texture, to breath, to fragility. It insists on being present with complexity and contradiction.

I aim to complete the LP and expand the audiovisual dimension of the project into a live, immersive performance piece. This will involve deeper integration of control-voltage systems, expanded vocal performance, and new compositions built around acoustic-electronic hybrid instruments, including hand percussion, palmas, and field-recorded samples. I also hope to collaborate with local artists and tap into Spain’s rich music and visual cultures, continuing a dialogue between analogue pasts and speculative futures.

Ultimately, Self-Love Songs is a love letter to interior life—an archive of feeling, a refusal to flatten emotion into genre or gesture. It belongs to no single tradition, but is in conversation with many: bedroom pop, queer experimentalism, diasporic electronics, devotional music.

It is a song cycle not about perfection, but about presence. And it asks: what if self-love, even in moments of wavering, is enough?

About

Jo Garrity (Yayas) is a musician, audiovisual artist, filmmaker, and performer working across live A/V, music video, film, and theatre. His practice blends analogue and digital techniques to explore emotion, memory, and embodied experience.

He began making music as Yayas in a bedroom pop tradition—intimate, self-taught, and emotionally raw—rooted in voice, vulnerability, and lo-fi experimentation. The name itself comes from the one he and his identical twin called themselves until the age of six, a trace of fused identity that continues to inform his work’s hybridity and inner dialogue. That ethos carries into Self-Love Songs, his genre-defying debut LP and live A/V performance, drawing on IDM, experimental pop, and electro-gospel to reflect on grief, resilience, and intimate expression through modular synths and video synthesis.

With a background in feature film editing at Pixar Animation Studios—including assisting on Inside Out—his roots are in emotionally impactful, communally-experienced storytelling. His short film Twinsburg, a tragicomic ode to identical twinship, screened at over 50 festivals, won 10 awards, and was featured in The New York Times. He served as lead editor and assistant director on Watergate (dir. Charles Ferguson), selected by Berlinale, Telluride, and NYFF. He is currently developing The Pepsi-Cola Addict, an independent feature to be produced in Spain.

His audiovisual collaborations include In Undertow (Alvvays), with whom he toured across the U.K. and North America using a custom live A/V rig, and Morgana (Hank May), a music video for mental health and suicide prevention awareness using a virtual production environment and motion-control camera system. His visuals and installations have been commissioned by artists including Crumb and DJ Holographic (Detroit). He creates immersive, cross-disciplinary performances including Windy Bluffs, improvised radio plays captured in spatial audio, and Sunday Night at Jane’s, a stage play for Hollywood Fringe incorporating live A/V scenography.