wow, x

‘You, with your habit of wanting to know why.’ C. Lispector

The Belgian pianist and producer maya dhondt releases a new album titled ‘wow, x’, marking her debut solo album under her own name. Navigating between bedroom glitch-pop and contemporary piano, she presents sounds of alienating beauty exploring the edges of her voice, language and twisted electronica. The album ‘wow, x’ will be released on September 13 on vinyl and all digital platforms via VIERNULVIER Records.

A postmodern cramp, that’s how one could describe the music of pianist and producer maya dhondt. Her music is an intuitive and a never ending exploration that has the potential to be and become a multitude of things at once.

“I find beauty in the uncomfortable and disorienting”

On her first solo album under her own name, ‘wow, x,’ she presents 10 varied tracks in which she creates equally idiosyncratic sound worlds. She takes the liberty to endlessly experiment with vocals, piano, and a mix of distorted lo-fi electronic sounds with an open mind. The result is sometimes synthetic and weird, sometimes compellingly beautiful, and always captivating, drawing you into its underlying melody. These intelligently crafted productions are connected by a penchant for alienating beauty: like a warm, but damp cave where it’s pleasant to linger just a little longer. Her original sound moves within a sonic spectrum reminiscent of contemporary artists such as Lolina, Astrid Sonne, claire rousay, aya or Carla Dal Forno.

“What I create never stands alone, it can be many things at once.”

If the world were a sculpture garden, maya dhondt eagerly picks from it to draw inspiration from both visual and literary passages as well as personal experiences. Her highly personal bedroom productions are grounded firmly in the world due to philosophical references and politically charged messages. And this world she lives in is being questioned on ‘wow, x’, as the title refers to “What Or Why?”. This is evident in the single ‘desire’: “What is the thing that matters / to exist / or to know you’re existing?” What does one choose in life: to live in the moment or to live to remember that moment? Without any judgment, the track plays with the philosophical thesis between feeling and thinking.

In the lyrics on ‘wow, x’, maya dhondt plays – at times childishly – with language and its boundaries. On ‘tip toe tip,’ banal wordplay leads to an unexpected confession, and the seemingly simple phrases in ‘untitled’ conceal hidden life lessons. dhondt’s world of words is multilayered and multilingual: Dutch (‘kleine cijfers, groot verlies’), English (‘desire’), and French (‘untitled’) are at her disposal. And on the fierce track that is ‘minimal-invasiv,’ not only she turns to hardstyle, but also to German – a language dear to her due to her Swiss heritage.

BIO

The classically trained maya dhondt is a pianist (degree at Conservatory of Antwerp) and producer who is also active in the performance scene. After residencies at places like STUK (Leuven), she has performed at venues such as VIERNULVIER, Beursschouwburg, Het Bos, and B-Classic (together with Hantrax).

She creates intuitively fragmented music, blending genres, sounds, and languages into a postmodern cramp of glitch-pop and contemporary piano. Up until 2023, she made music under the alter ego Wendy.