Spring Snow

Compass

Aïsha Devi returns with new album 'Death is Home' on Houndstooth, her first LP since 2018 and her most personal work yet.

Aïsha Devi nurtures an idiosyncratic approach to her music. She describes her sound as Aetherave, and uses bassy-heavy club motifs and intentional aesthetic signifiers to transport listeners to a dizzying, kinetic environment, harnessing timeless frequencies. On each record, Devi has advanced her philosophy and developed her technology; her last album 'DNA Feelings' (2018) was a radical hybrid of ancient mysticism and rebellious pop, and her upcoming LP 'Death is Home' propels listeners towards the extremes, bending fictile beats and cybernetic textures into transformational songs. This eagerly-awaited new album is a liveable, breathable sonic essence that reveals itself alchemically, reorienting anachronistic cultural preconceptions with its contemporary, ornate language and eerie architecture.

'Death is Home' is ultimately a manifesto. It's Devi's most revealing work to date and a direct result of her personal evolution and ongoing quest. Growing up under the shadow of isolation and abuse, she formed her practice as a healing method, using it to neutralize her past and recreate an alternate, more hospitable reality - beyond the human condition. Her feelings were compounded when she tracked down the whereabouts of her father B.K. Gurung, a Nepali drummer whom she never knew. Devi was informed he had died young, but rather than perceive this as a binary, through mourning, she realized that his existence had already offered her a lifeline and a refuge.

Devi's words and productions reach out to a place where weightlessness has the power to dissolve the corporeal world's manufactured terror of death. Without this trepidation, life's boundaries and limitations fall away. "Burn the flesh, a Deva's born," she sings over tense, pneumatic kicks on 'Not Defined by the Visible'. Her voice is contorted by electronic processes, but the meaning is human: to reach the holy, we must shed our skin. The narrative that guides the album unfurls with the plasticity of an open-world videogame, a space where one can unravel the dogma of life vs. death. On 'Lick Your Wounds', Devi reveals her deepest trauma, pacifying it with rousing, ritualistic rhythms and melancholic pads. "Vapors of violence remain in my broken bones, intoxicate my DNA," she invokes. "I'll lick my wounds and heal at night. I'll take over." She extends this invitation to anybody tuned in to her signals, providing lodging for those that crave it. Birth is virtual. Death is home. 
credits
releases November 10, 2023

Written, composed & produced by Aïsha Devi
Track 4 features Slikback
Mixed by Theo Karon
Artwork by Niels Wehrspann
Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, London
Manufactured at optimal-media, Germany
Cat. No. HTH172 – All rights reserved
℗ & © Houndstooth 2023

Aïsha Devi - Immortelle

Ego Death Memories

I Used To Give a Fuck

@violentquandonaime

helen island - last liasse
Vinyl/Streaming/Digital
- 21.02.24 -

Ghastly and hallucinatory – Last Liasse is a sign of the times, alternative pop record by Helen Island. Within this debut album, the artist captures the saccharine gaze of digital escapism through characteristic filtered high notes, cut-up genres, and processed vocals. Providing a comprehensive overview of Helen Island’s self-distributed initiatives, with the ethos of the Parisian Simple Music Experience collective, the twelve tracks set a solid musical score that resonates with the age to come.

helen island - alice dj

Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream

Performed February 8, 2025 at the Festival of Contemporary Artists in Music, Washington State University, Pullman, WA

Aaron Hill, tenor sax

Convergent Evolution

V/A - mono no aware もののあわれ

Format: 2xLP / Digital
Label: PAN
Cat.No: PAN 77
Release Date: 17 March 2017

http://p-a-n.org/

purchase:
site: http://bit.ly/2mQN5AO
bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2n9ToSm

mono no aware (もののあわれ) is the first compilation to be released on PAN, collating unreleased ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists.

Featuring Jeff Witscher, Helm, TCF, Yves Tumor, M.E.S.H., Pan Daijing, HVAD, Kareem Lotfy, ADR, Mya Gomez, Sky H1, James K, Oli XL, Bill Kouligas, Flora Yin-Wong, Malibu, and AYYA, the compilation moves through more traditional notions of what is called ’ambient’, to incorporating wider variations that fall under the term.

“Mono no aware”, ‘the pathos of things’, also translates as “an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera”. A term for the awareness of impermanence, or the transience of things. A meditation on mortality and life's transience, ephemerality heightens the appreciation of beauty and sensitivity to their passing. In investigating the passing of time, the boundaries between memory and hallucination become blurred; between fiction and reality. The movement of time transforms into an eternal present.

The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring photography by Molly Matalon and design by Bill Kouligas. A limited version of 100 copies will be released as a special art edition in collaboration with Mount Analog for the LA Art Book Fair 2017, before going on general release.

mono no aware

6. AYYA - Second Mistake (PAN 77)

TOXE — Blinks
Format: 12"/Digital
Cat.No: PAN 88
Release Date: 22 June 2018
Purchase: https://toxe.bandcamp.com/album/blinks

Swedish producer Toxe's sharp ascent through club-cursed climes has elicited the highest praise from the start. In just a few years she has linked up with Staycore and Halcyon Veil, presented an A/V project 
with The Vinyl Factory, and scored KENZO's FW 2016 prints presentation with close collaborator Mechatok. Her new EP 'Blinks' is a fractal bloom of candied melodies and minor laments set in a sweep of frenetic rhythmic scenes. 

Developed throughout last year, 'Blinks' journals a period of inward flux. And though this is never presented in an overtly self-conscious way on the EP, Toxe binds a sweet juvenilia with a bustling and eager pensive tone to outline her tessellating sense of self just below the surface. 

Meditative glimpses of soaring synthetic landscapes are woven across 'Blinks' in brief snatches. Awash in horrific and gripping fluorescent hues, these environments are augmented by a comically mischievous 
patchwork of voices and saccharine rasps that clamour for attention, hinting at Toxe's impulse to voice a simultaneous and unorganised set of experiences. 

The release is mastered by Jeremy Cox, featuring art by Jasper Spicero.

@to-xe
http://p-a-n.org

Blinks

Toxe – Honey Island (PAN 88)

Motion

I Think I Am

RIFT One is the first instalment in a series of releases curated by YEAR0001, featuring contributions and commissions by a variety of highly innovative and influential artists.

By releasing this compilation ahead of schedule and donating all proceeds from purchases directly to community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organisers we hope to make a small contribution towards awareness and change, and encourage our community to act against injustice and stand together in solidarity. 

Racial injustice, white supremacy and all forms of discrimination simply has no place in the culture we represent; we will continue to educate ourselves, listen, learn and find more ways to support both in a short and long term perspective.

All future entries of the RIFT compilation series will also donate to humanitarian organisations and funds.

Please also consider to donate further & educate yourself through the link below

https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co

@torvs
@chariot-official
@namasenda
@dark0
@graemenorgate
@bladee1000
@bloodzboi4life
@quiltland
@gucci_lokey
@oqbqbo
@scandinavianstar
@ishivu
@fakethias
@varg
@miniesco
@mssingno
@h_x_e
@thaiboy-digital
@jonatanleandoer127
@baojiaxiang
@palmistry
@qlqlql
@mechatok
@to-xe
@xtosgr
@nadiatehran

Toxe - Be By The Sea

Two Autumns

With Eyes Unclouded By Longing

Label based in Berlin, est. 2008. http://www.p-a-n.org