- A heartbreaking work of posthuman genius couched in post-club electronics.
- Greek tragedy. String theory. Society of spectacle and The Vedas. These are just a few of the reference points and theories that underpin Aïsha Devi's work. Most music might falter under the weight of such lofty themes, but Devi's records are almost cosmologically enveloping:
trance arpeggios, colossal but broken drum patterns, walls of bass and her gorgeous soprano voice processed beyond recognition all come together to create a sound as strange as it is wondrous. Her newest LP, Death Is Home, is her most fully-realized to date, balancing fierce, club intensity with delicate posthuman ballads.
Listening to the album, I was reminded of the work of queer theorist Heather Davis. Davis describes how we are enmeshed in a world of plastic, from the microplastics inside of us to the screens we're both looking at right now. But she also argues that plastic is more than just an index of human destruction. Plastic models a new way of relating to the world, one where we understand our identities as forever open to being reshaped. "Plastic asks us to become attuned to these divergent realities," she writes, "to think through the consequences of technological development and the ways they distribute harm and possibility, while simultaneously understanding that the proliferation of any technology is beyond human control."
This could just as easily describe the violence and the beauty of Devi's music. Across Death Is Home, she makes us wonder whether we're looking for ghosts inside machines or machines inside ghosts. This longing for a realm beyond humanity makes sense given the record's context. Devi wrote Death Is Home after searching for a father she had never met. Over the course of writing the record, she learned her father had died tragically young. Instead of seeing this as an ending, Devi saw it as an opening to commune to a world beyond our present one. Both "Mind Era" and "Prophet Club," for example, are gentle odes to loss—slowed tempos and spacious drums let her processed voice find hidden registers of emotion even without discernible lyrics. The melodies and vocals on "Azoth Eyes" are gossamer-like, threatening to disappear if it weren't for the crash of static every few bars that builds into a claustrophobic crescendo at the song's end.
What makes these songs so singular is how they dissolve the line between the organic and the synthetic. "I am neither a one or zero. I am neither dead or alive," she sings over undulating chords on the forlorn "The Infinite Chemistry of the Betwixt (Tool)." The record's emotional core, "Unborn Yet Alive," is the perfect example of this hybrid world. Trance stabs and trap 808s push through a hazy stereo field of vinyl crackle before a guitar culled from a spaghetti western wanders in all guns blazing. Devi's voice reaches the apex of its soprano range, but just as she taunts us with actual singing, she starts to remix it in real time, the contortion and compression distorting it beyond recognition. It's like listening to a love song written in a world where the AI have taken over and they are trying to recreate human sounds from scratched country music CDs.
Death Is Home is the culmination of the sounds Devi has been exploring since she hung up her Kate Wax alias and began releasing music under her own name a decade ago. Each release since then has played with a different angle—icy, abstract minimalism met club ferocity on DNA Feelings, while S.L.F. was pure darkness with only hints of a rave afterglow making their way past the storming bass and drums. Death Is Home finds a softer middle ground. There are plenty of moments of darkness here (just check those ferocious synth revs on "Dimensional Spleen," her collab with Slikback), but underneath the skittering, razor-sharp synths and corroded trap snare rolls, this record is Devi at her most vulnerable and her most singular.
Tracklist01. Not Defined By The Visible
02. Immortelle
03. Lick Your Wounds
04. Dimensional Spleen feat. Slikback
05. The Infinite Chemistry of the Betwixt (Tool)
06. Unborn Yet Alive
07. Mind Era
08. The 7th Element
09. Prophet Club
10. Azoth Eyes