Bleep

Aïsha Devi has never shied away from the spiritual in her music, combining philosophy, science, and mysticism into invigorating rave productions. This has always been an introspective practice as she sonically draws from her own life, but on her third album Death Is Home, Aïsha Devi lays bare her most personal experiences yet. In the years since 2018’s DNA Feelings, Devi has chased the memory of her late father, a drummer named B.K. Gurung whom she had never known, throughout Nepal and the clubs of Kathmandu, resulting in “layers of discoveries” that manifest through simultaneously weightless and crushing electronics.

The sounds of Death Is Home often have a physical, fluid presence: the synths of ‘Not Defeated By The Visible’ resemble the Nepalese and Tibetan traditions of overtone singing, filtered through the metallic audio signature of gongs. Minimal rhythms skitter and spark, while a drilling, whistling melody rises above the epic fervour, then plummets like a meteor into an EBM-styled breakdown. Such is Aïsha Devi’s practice of musical metamorphosis, where no sound is left unchanged as it travels through each song’s terrain.

Her own vocals too go through manifold mutations, tiptoeing serpentine into the scintillating oblivion of ‘Immortelle’ where dark, skeletal beats tick through bass black as tar. They are vaporific amidst intense jets of percussive noise and spewing low frequency fountains, reconstructed entirely as pneumatic beats lift solemn progressions. ‘The Infinite Chemistry of the Betwixt’ is an eerie, transcendental monologue on eternality and liminality, tying together the album’s themes before its second half slams with starbursts and corroded, marching stomps, and Devi’s defiant war cry: “I’m immortal, baby.”

Traversing sparse synthetic soundscapes and transforming through heavily manipulated vocals, Aïsha Devi unravels her Nepalese ancestry like never before on Death Is Home.