Ayesha Is Piecing Herself Back Together
a.k.a. In her first interview since a hit-and-run accident upended her life earlier this year, the New York-based artist details her recovery and reevaluates her place in the dance music sphere.
Anyone who follows artists online knows that they routinely have to deal with all sorts of problems. Dwindling record sales, rising touring costs, finicky algorithms, promoters and media outlets that care more about follower counts than music … The list of hurdles is virtually endless, but as difficult as the life of an artist can be, few of the challenges they face truly qualify as matters of life and death.
Ayesha, however, might be the exception who proves the rule.
At the beginning of the year, the New York-based artist was riding high. Aside from being a resident DJ at NYC nightspot Nowadays, her debut album, Rhythm Is Memory, had been one of 2023’s most lauded long-players, particularly among fans of bass-heavy club sounds. Between that and the fawning attention she was getting from the music press, her profile was steadily on the rise, and Ayesha was increasingly finding herself on the touring circuit, both in the US and overseas.
And then, all of that came to a sudden halt.
In March, while walking home from a nearby park, she was struck by a car. Seriously injured, she wound up in the hospital, and even after being discharged, the fact that she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury meant that her road to recovery would be a long one. More than seven months later, she’s still on that road, and dealing with the lingering psychological, emotional, economic and cognitive effects of what happened.
Adding to the complexity of it all, Ayesha has been grappling with those effects while also working her way back into dance music. Although the accident not surprisingly required her to cancel a slew of gigs, including an entire European tour, she’s (gradually) pressed on with her career, and even made her live debut at MUTEK in August. Doing that hasn’t been easy, and while she’s shared occasional updates about her condition on social media, she’s stayed relatively quiet about the realities of what she’s been going through, which includes everything from bureaucratic headaches and difficulty looking at screens to having to majorly rewire her approach to DJing, both inside and outside the club.
I had no knowledge about any of that when I reached out to Ayesha earlier this month, but knowing how severe her accident had been, I figured that there was more to the story than could be gleaned from Instagram. She agreed to tell me some of that story via a proper interview, and over the course of a long call last week, we talked about her creative process and artistic outlook, and how they have (and, in some cases, haven’t) been affected by the accident. More importantly though, Ayesha provided the lowdown about what her life has been like during the past seven months, sharing intimate details about the accident and her recovery process, which hasn’t gone as quickly or smoothly as she imagined it would. In a dance music scene where most artists are constantly striving to project success and present the best possible version of themselves, it’s rare that someone make themselves this vulnerable, but as she explained, honesty has always been one of her calling cards.