Aïsha Devi lives in the fifth dimension

https://www.documentjournal.com/2024/04/aisha-devi-metaphysics-trance-state-death-is-home-aetherave-techno/

Ahead of her live performance at Barcelona’s upcoming Sònar Festival, the Swiss-Nepali artist talks metaphysics, trance states

Electronic musician Aïsha Devi is a metaphysicist in addition to being one of the most in-demand underground artists. “I developed my own techniques combining alchemy, proto-religious practices, and ancestral knowledge as metaphysical data that I inject into my tracks,” Devi tells me in a tone simultaneously friendly and exact. The Swiss-Nepali artist does this to “expand the brain, alter the perception of reality, and access a limitless state of existence.” Onstage, she embodies her given surname, which means “goddess” in Sanskrit. “It’s not about power,” she says. “It’s about giving something back to people. Becoming the goddess is the realization that you are the egoless self creator.”

I’m somewhat thankful to be communicating via a computer, with the internet as a buffer between our energies—according to her (and modern developments in quantum physics), “99 percent of existence is invisible, energetic, and electrical. Some still only believe in what they see,” she says. Our eye contact—sustained on Zoom—can only confirm that one percent of what I see is real. Looking at Devi, her spiritually ego-less definition of “goddess” by her definition is the best way to describe the other 99 percent that I can’t see with my own two eyes. This is what her music is concerned with. “Zero and one can only be zero and one. The binary code belongs to the 3D. I make music that would represent transcendental numbers, everything in between.”

“Music belongs to the 5D,” she says, holding up her palm to reveal a tattoo of a double helix. “DNA itself is the representation of the caduceus and the lemniscate.” Referring to palm exercises in hermetic meditation, Devi’s ink becomes both a tool of worship and an ode to her sophomore album DNA Feelings from 2018, a sonic version of an alchemical practice heavy with glittering windchimes, mystic and wet-sounding vocals—not to mention a severe bass that goes so hard it becomes trance-inducing.” “I like the idea that my live shows resonate long after, in bodies, particles, and minds,” she mentions. “That it’s carried on in people’s atomic structure.”

Devi’s universe exists in opposition to Western society, a world she came to question during her childhood in Switzerland. 

For Devi, finding levity in her electronic music is the tool to ascension. “When I produce music, I send a signal to the world, and it’s always amazing to see that when you play a show, this omniform audience is your family, your community,” she notes. “Space is an energetical organizer; space is my song arranger. My intention via music is to recall and re-initiate this connection, make people experience infinity in their body and their mental space.”

Devi is a monk in her own right, more interested in the act of transcendence, physically and mentally. Sound waves travel through her laptop perched on a concert stage, its adapters and cords and wires, thumping through the speakers of a festival stage as easily as they could be rendered acoustic in some pre-modern setting. A ritual takes place, a party is thrown; the machine-music becomes the ancestral, the human communicates not with language, but with frequencies. We want to call it spiritual, though the actual term is often thrown around by those who refuse to mean what they say. “Spirituality has become the accessory of supreme well-being integrated in capitalism, promoting it and enhancing the idea of expansion and material growth,” Devi reminds me.

She tells me civilization is collapsing, and it doesn’t feel scary. “We are transitioning to a new era, and both worlds—the old Western world and the new omnidimensional syncretic world—are colliding. Meditation, as well as mantras, reciting, and ritualistic processions are a tool of consciousness alteration, a path between conscious and unconscious, a portal to higher dimensional planes.” Maybe we are clouds made of electrons, living under the quantum law of a rave. Aïsha Devi isn’t a god, but the harbinger of this transition to beyond. Her music is the intelligent artifact, the user interface between now and the future.