Aïsha Devi

My music practice in general is an initiatic journey, a journey that is granting me access to a wealth of knowledge that I reinsert into my music. I now produce music with a very clear conscious sense of healing. I am now working through a syncretic prism, layering my proto-religious knowledge together – like Shamanism and alchemy. Music and frequencies are the primordial essence that orders the tangible and the intangible, the matter and the energy. My specific practice of music feels like an infinite initiation to the invisible and an ongoing experimentation of human spleen healing.

This album is a conjunction between my personal and spiritual realization and a more metaphysical point of view on society that all come together. A point where my own genesis, including childhood traumas, identity quests, personal and philosophical questions come together in one vision. Death Is Home is not a death cult, obviously, but a personal reconnection with my dead father. A way to extend my fantasized relationship with my unknown father. Even dead, he became a central force in my life, a kind of eternal idol.
It’s also my own take on Socrates’ concept of uncertainty, a metaphysical empowerment manifesto that counteracts this anthropophagic society, a society that both promotes death and the fear of death. This process really inscribed itself through my own genesis. I never really talked much about my life in my songs, my vocals were never so lyrical, but now I am opening up a little bit more about my journey, why I’m here, and what has defined me. I think that’s the most important thing on the album: the conjunction of a personal quest and a universal spiritual answer.

Music has always been a tool of expression, of belonging, but I also realized that it’s actually the essential force that modulates matter and non-matter. Modern physics acknowledges 11 dimensions, and we perceive life in just 3D. To heal this civilization, I think we will have to be much more aware of our existence outside of this corporeal reality and in a higher dimensional plane. I really think that hyper-materialism is annihilating our sense of immortality, and that’s why the intangibility of music is so present in our life. Music is one of the tools that can help us initiate this consciousness and open the portals. I want to bring back the essential ritualistic aspect in contemporary music.

I’m interested in electronic music as the last form of modern ceremonial gathering and communion. When you go to a club, you look up and think, these lights remind you of something; the spotlights, the colors, the fog. I think that clubs are an emulation of the cosmos. The lightning system of a club is a simulation of the universe. That’s why we’ve been gathering and raving in nature for so long. We’ve been bringing speakers out in the woods and just dancing until dawn – that’s what clubs are for, for gathering and sharing a collective altered state of consciousness. Club culture is really important, freedom and transcendence for all, something that the Western world is totally afraid of. I want to heal spleens in clubs.

We say time is money, that motto reveals time in a very materialistic and physical angle. For me, space is the new time and the new money. Spacetime is limiting us in understanding our own eternity. When you exit the traditional pop format of a 3 minute track and go to an ambient or metal show for instance, your comprehension of time will be altered. Ritualistic music and specific genres can remodulate and modify our perception of time. I call my music Aetherave, a rave that generates spacetime’s dissolution.

I never felt belonging to this world, to its system nor its categorization and I think this is why I always felt home in a queer environment . There’s a track in my new album calledThe Infinite Chemistry of the Betwixt which has these lyrics:

This reality is maintaining me below
Below myself, below the multiple states of existence, underneath infinity
I found my way to antigravity and I exist in between archetypes
I am not one or zero, I am a transcendental number, I am everything within
I am never-ending and immortal, my chemistry is beyond duality
I am not dead or alive but in the trance of the between

I think binary is obsolete, binary is the codex for the 3D. But as people who never found themselves belonging to a certain archetype, that’s what we feel. The idea I want to communicate is that we are multiple. I had another track that said, “If you name me, you negate me.” I want to be omniform and one definition is limiting.

I’ve realized one of the most important common concepts throughout our whole civilization around the world is transcendence and the essential role of music to access transcendence. The idea of transcendence emerged very recently in physics theory and science is still extra discreet about it, but I'm pretty sure science will prove Shamans right. We live in a society that promotes both death and the fear of death. There are so many cultures where it’s a celebration, a passage. Our society has made it taboo and sterile, the end.  It’s a way to maximise capitalism – it’s really damaging. 'Death is Home' is also a reappropriation of our own resonance with death and a way to disintegrate fear via trance states.

Go watch a Slikback DJ set, it’s a ritual and a complete purge. The spectrum of frequencies he’s using, the way he organises the narrative, he is building a dramaturgy to elevate the crowd. In these intense dance floor experiences your whole body is reordered on an energetic and atomic level. I like the idea of musicians being superconductors. My grandfather was a superconductivity theoretician. Searching for the ultimate matter with zero electrical resistance is so beautiful. As an artist, if you can resonate without resistance, a quasi dissipated ego, you are a perfect vector, you let the frequencies act and the music heal.

I like that terminology. I also think that in literature and art in general, the archetypes of the blind and the madman are very important. I think I’m a bit of a madman, the one who will put the light on the intangible. But the madman is a renegade, I'm a club kid and an outcast.

My label collective Danse Noire has been organizing parties in Berlin and when he played for one of our nights, it was exhilarating. This is what I'm searching for, an experience where you forget about your visible manifestation but concentrate on the energetic and chemical factor. Chemically Slikback is one of the best. The collaboration for the track Dimensional Spleen unfolded with total fluidity, a natural unspoken comprehension of the chemical potion we wanted to create.

I’m sending specific signals via my music, a cypher that people respond to when they oscillate in my cosmos or when they come to see me play. I think my audience knows stuff too and we connect. They know that they come as they are, multiple and limitless. It is a kind of invisible constant resonance. I don’t like the idea of the artist being on a pedestal, just bearing their art for people to watch. My show is consciously active and animated by the people present, and it’s a resonating experience for everyone in the room. It’s an ongoing experience – I will continue to have relationships with people, like mycelium we extend our world, building a community together. I continue to resonate with what we shared.

I’ll be touring extensively next year for the 'Death is Home' live experience and I'm currently working on the visuals and scenography for the new show. Aethernal Score, the piece which I composed for the BBC Concert Orchestra will also be released in its orchestral live version next year. I think I will bounce between the stage and the studio, as I already want to produce new music, and I'm thinking about collaborations.

After Covid, I’ve seen people becoming wilder and more confident about generating their own world, that’s what interests me: a singular personal microcosmos. I can’t wait to blend my and other artist’s parallel universes to create new sensations and new fantasies.