Aïsha Devi

[CH]

Swiss-born, Nepalese-Tibetan producer Aïsha Devi's hypnotic machine meditations fall somewhere between club music and ecstatic ritual. A classically trained soprano, Devi's recent work contorts and extends her own voice, experimenting with Eastern scales, chanting and the guttural drones of Tuvan throat singing.

Devi logged her early releases under the alias Kate Wax on James Holden's Border Community, Trevor Jackson's Output, and Mental Groove. In 2013, however, she took back her own name and founded Danse Noire: a platform for esoteric techno. The label's roster includes ambassadors of Italy's experimental new wave like Haf Haf and Vaghe Stelle, as well as Devi herself. In 2014, she released Hakken Dub / Throat Dub, which spawned reworks by IVVVO and maverick Mathematics label head Hieroglyphic Being. The following year, she joined the Fabric-affiliated Houndstooth label with Conscious Cunt, a 12-inch meditation on "sluts, awareness, death, and women in a patriarchal society… enlightenment, violence, resistance, mothers, daughters, consciousness, Guy Debord, Vedas, and eternity." Devi followed the EP, which also featured a poem written by Pakistani feminist Kishwar Naheed, with her debut album, Of Matter And Spirit. Released in October 2015, the LP was inspired by conversations with her grandfather on sound, vibrations and the parallels between physics and spirituality.

Devi was also a 2015 member of SHAPE, a new 3-year initiative from ICAS and the Creative Europe programme of the European Union that supports emergent musicians and interdisciplinary artists.

 


Aïsha Devi's CTM 2016 performance is supported by the Swiss arts council Pro Helvetia.

Zones III

Berghain, Thu 04.02.2016, 22:00

Tara Transitory aka One Man Nation , group A , Aïsha Devi & Tianzhuo Chen feat Beio , Le1f, Lena Willikens