DNA Feelings

Album review

Aïsha Devi doesn’t do music like everyone else. The Swiss, revealed in 2015 with her first album Of Matter and Spirit, produces unclassifiable sounds, somewhere between abstract, ambient and techno. The simplest is incidentally to associate her with Venezuelan producer Arca or with Björk. Like the former, she hijacks the codes of electronic music, and like the latter, she uses her voice like an instrument in its own right. And like both, she journeys across musical dimensions which others barely dare to enter. Few artists want to take the risk to alienate part of their audience by launching into trips as mystical and hypnotic as the ones she unleashes on this new album. But as indicated by its name, DNA Feelings, her music is inherent to her artistic personality. DNA ☤ ∞ and Dislocation of the Alpha, the first two titles, do not display any melody in the pop sense of the term, but put into sound what is happening in Aïsha Devi’s exuberant mind.

Pitched voice, quilted synths, biting beats, stifling sub-bass, Aïsha Devi uses every weapon in the arsenal of modern electro production, but with an angle, which allows her to create dreamlike spaces like on Intentional Dreams or Aetherave. The spiritual and meditative dimension remains of course essential for this singer of Nepalese and Tibetan descent who doesn’t love anything more than blending worlds, inserting Hindu symbols or third eyes in her clips, with the implicit intention to make us exit our dimension. And it is true that throughout this disc, we are under the impression of being in the middle of the Zion rave in Matrix. So, will you choose the blue pill or the red pill? © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz