Aïsha Devi - Death Is Home (2023) [Hi-Res]

Aïsha Devi returns with new album 'Death is Home' on Houndstooth, her first LP since 2018 and her most personal work yet.

Aïsha Devi nurtures an idiosyncratic approach to her music. She describes her sound as Aetherave, and uses bassy-heavy club motifs and intentional aesthetic signifiers to transport listeners to a dizzying, kinetic environment, harnessing timeless frequencies. On each record, Devi has advanced her philosophy and developed her technology; her last album 'DNA Feelings' (2018) was a radical hybrid of ancient mysticism and rebellious pop, and her upcoming LP 'Death is Home' propels listeners towards the extremes, bending fictile beats and cybernetic textures into transformational songs. This eagerly-awaited new album is a liveable, breathable sonic essence that reveals itself alchemically, reorienting anachronistic cultural preconceptions with its contemporary, ornate language and eerie architecture.

'Death is Home' is ultimately a manifesto. It's Devi's most revealing work to date and a direct result of her personal evolution and ongoing quest. Growing up under the shadow of isolation and abuse, she formed her practice as a healing method, using it to neutralize her past and recreate an alternate, more hospitable reality - beyond the human condition. Her feelings were compounded when she tracked down the whereabouts of her father B.K. Gurung, a Nepali drummer whom she never knew. Devi was informed he had died young, but rather than perceive this as a binary, through mourning, she realized that his existence had already offered her a lifeline and a refuge.

Devi's words and productions reach out to a place where weightlessness has the power to dissolve the corporeal world's manufactured terror of death. Without this trepidation, life's boundaries and limitations fall away. "Burn the flesh, a Deva's born," she sings over tense, pneumatic kicks on 'Not Defined by the Visible'. Her voice is contorted by electronic processes, but the meaning is human: to reach the holy, we must shed our skin. The narrative that guides the album unfurls with the plasticity of an open-world videogame, a space where one can unravel the dogma of life vs. death. On 'Lick Your Wounds', Devi reveals her deepest trauma, pacifying it with rousing, ritualistic rhythms and melancholic pads. "Vapors of violence remain in my broken bones, intoxicate my DNA," she invokes. "I'll lick my wounds and heal at night. I'll take over." She extends this invitation to anybody tuned in to her signals, providing lodging for those that crave it. Birth is virtual. Death is home.