Between 2004 and 2011, Aisha Devi kept her music — released under the alias Kate Wax — focused on the cosmos. Inspired by her grandfather, a researcher at CERN, she gave her albums titles such as Reflections of the Dark Heat and Dust Collision, and mapped unthinkable distances with measured pulses, patient analog sequences, and her own voice, wispy as the fogged breath on the inside of a space helmet. Now, returning to her own name, the Tibetan-Swiss artist has charted a new course, one headed deeper and deeper into the inner space of mind, body, and soul. Hence “Clean Ur Chakras,” a lo-fi techno cut suffused in hackle-raising gothic chants, or “Jesus & the Math,” which sounds like a Sunday School choir covering the Knife.
To round out her debut outing under her own name, Devi has turned to Hyperdub’s Cooly G and L.I.E.S. and WT Records’ Willie Burns for remixes. Burns takes the keening, shuffling “Popular Science” and contorts it into a writhing acid workout, balancing industrial-strength drums with queasy frequencies that bubble like biological entities.
Devi’s Aura 4 Everyone EP is out this week on her own Danse Noire label; listen to Willie Burns’ remix below.
