Aïsha Devi is making rave music for ritual healing

At some point during my interview with Aïsha Devi she accidentally sets herself on fire. We’re in the middle of a conversation about ritual healing on the dancefloor when the lighter in her pocket goes off and begins to burn a tiny hole in her pocket. “It’s the eternal flame,” she laughs, embracing the sudden change in tone, redirecting it back to the point at hand. “This is exactly what happens in music when you go to a show. Any notion of space and time dissolves and you forget about any physical manifestation around you.”

For an artist whose distinct strain of rave music appears to transcend the earthly realms, Devi is no stranger to signs of spiritual rebirth. The Swiss-Nepali artist has spent the best part of a decade transporting listeners to higher planes, combining elements of ancient mysticism with cybernetic frequencies that feel out of this world. This is most apparent in her latest album Death Is Home, where Devi channels bass-heavy club motifs and weightless vocals to move beyond the physical confines of the body, towards a place of weightlessness – a sound she describes as aetherave, after the fifth element ‘aether’, where music becomes a way of unlocking the intangible – “where we can exist with transcending matter and where we can exist as only solely the mind”.

Devi has long integrated spiritual elements into her musical practice, most recently at Berlin’s CTM festival, where she sent binaural beats pulsating through the crowd. “There is a clear intention in my music to dissolute spacetime,” she says. “When I play live, the audience enters this cosmos and we are part of one same cosmos that is free from any heaviness and judgement.” It’s an idiosyncratic approach to electronic music that harks back to Devi’s own experiences with the dancefloor as a site of healing, from past isolation and trauma. This is explored at its most revealing on the track “Lick Your Wounds”, where Devi calls on music’s alchemical ability to untangle even the deepest of wounds as she sings: “Vapours of violence remain in my broken bones, intoxicate my DNA / I'll lick my wounds and heal at night. I'll take over.”

The title Death Is Home is a reference to Devi’s desire to carve out new realities beyond the human condition. “It’s a metaphysical empowerment towards the concept of death,” she explains. “In Western society, we constantly fear the idea of transcendence because it contradicts capitalism and the idea of YOLO. When you have that concept in your mind, you want to fill the void.” Through shamanic spirituality, she uses music as a vessel to embrace different ways of knowing, dissolving the boundaries between the material and immaterial worlds to connect with the eternal. She expands, “Without this trepidation, life's boundaries and limitations fall away.”

Currently preparing for her upcoming live show at London’s ICA, it’s a message that Devi extends to anyone tuned into her signals. She believes that unlocking new altered states of consciousness will become increasingly relevant as we enter a new era of AI and advanced tech. “We’re entering a new mind era because we’re shifting from the heaviness of machinery to go into the virtual world,” she adds, “we’re living in the 3D world but, for me, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.” To strip the idea back to its most simple, it goes like this: Birth is virtual. Death is home.

Aisha Devi: Les Immortelles is live at the ICA on April 20 with lighting design and scenography from Emmanuel Biard }§{