The culmination, up to now, in the oeuvre of Geneva native Aïsha Devi was marked by last year’s album Of Matter and Spirit, which appeared on the London label Houndstooth. Among the album’s tracks is “Mazdâ”, the inspiration for an accompanying video produced by Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen [see zweikommasieben #28]. As Devi’s music does, the video grants a glimpse into a world that might only be accessed through an as yet hidden door in Dune’s video to the legendary “Hardcore Vibes”; it’s scatterbrained, dazzling, and blissed out.
The collaboration between Aïsha and Tianzhuo was initiated after Niels Wehrspann, himself a DJ and designer for Danse Noire [see zweikommasieben #11], visited an exhibition of Chen’s at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris last summer. In the exhibition, the Beijing-based artist presented diverse works referencing drugs, LGBT hip hop, the London rave scene, Japanese Butoh, the fashion world, and various religious symbols. After hearing about the exhibition from Wehrspann, Devi proceeded to get in touch with Chen.
Lendita and Guy Schwegler of zweikommasieben conducted an extensive interview with Aïsha last fall. The first part of the interview was published in the CTM Festival 2016 magazine. The second part is printed here and supplemented by a short interview with Tianzhou. Just as their jointly orchestrated performance at Berghain in early February was, these interviews are a testament to how well these two artists’ respective visions work together.
Teil I: Aïsha Devi
Lendita Schwegler You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you see yourself as an outcast. The Danse Noire Label might therefore be a solution or an answer to that. How much is Danse Noire connected to inclusion, or, respectively, exclusion?
Aïsha Devi When I’m talking about spirituality I’m not talking about a sect. It’s not like I’m intending to drag people into a way of thinking—it’s aimed at people who are using their own freedom and coming to realize their own power in society. The difference between religion and spirituality for me is that religion is exclusive, while spirituality is inclusive. So it deals exactly with that feeling of being an outcast. I never felt like I belonged to anything in society—I never knew my father, never really had a family, I always looked weird and had a weird name…now, with this label, I have the sense of belonging to a family, on a bigger level belonging to a certain scene in music, and on an even bigger level belonging to the world, actually. So you know, it’s never exclusive.
Danse Noire is kind of ‘refugee’ platform—it’s for people who have found their own language in music because they never felt like they belonged to this world. I’m drawn to these different languages. These artists don’t follow the stream—they develop their own singular worlds. And I’m absolutely attracted to that. That may sound exclusive, but it’s not, if you really think about it. Everyone should develop a personal language. Right now our own languages are basically crushed—we have one standard, one language dominating the whole world. But the more we have individual languages pop up in the world, the more the world will be harmonized.
LS How did your collaboration with the label Houndstooth come about?
AD My amazing booker was in contact with Houndstooth and sent them the music. The response we got from them was so mind-blowing—the way they dove into my cosmos and absolutely embraced it. The words they used to describe my music…it was exactly what I was waiting for from a label—for it to understand the intention, the content, my universe. So I was sure about them and wanted to work with them.
Guy Schwegler The title of your album, Of Matter and Spirit, indicates a combination of physics and metaphysics. To what extent do you see this combination as a solution to the current situation, in which, once again, there’s a clash between secular and religious worlds?
AD First of all, I don’t see it as a solution—it’s simply what I have experienced with meditation. My whole meditation process was so eye- and heart-opening. It also broadened my perspective on the world. It healed me…and it gave me an alternative—an alternative to the materialistic world.
The title Of Matter and Spirit is the name of the last book by my grandfather [Charles Paul Enz], who was a physician. Through that book I realized that the world of physics is actually totally in keeping with the spiritual world. The discoveries they made with quantum physics through altered dimensions and energy analyses corresponded with what was said four thousand years ago in the Upanishads, the ancient Hindu texts. The ancient knowledge I gathered in those texts through meditation already anticipated a lot of those answers in physics. So for me, physics and metaphysics, as well as sacred geometry—it’s all one thing. It’ll make us realize that our materialistic, egocentric and individualistic way of living is not an answer. You realize at the end of your life that massive fortune and huge success doesn’t give you liberation from anything—least of all from your own death. Music, meditation, and spirituality have given me the opportunity to escape my own physicality, and given me an idea of immortality. The more you leave the materialistic world, the more you embrace your energy. The less you’re physical, the less you fear your own death. And I’ve experienced that in meditation through a change in dimensions. That’s also what I’m doing when I’m producing music—changing dimensions. That’s the power of virtuality. That’s why I love producing on a computer. You escape your own physicality. You escape the materialistic world in order to enter into virtuality. That’s the intention in the album—to make people understand that physicists will give those answers too, that there are other dimensions we don’t see. But they exist. That’s something you’re aware of when you meditate and something they knew when they wrote all the ancient texts. This won’t save us, but it will make us better—we’ll lose our materialistic fetishism, our idolization for material consumption. It’s very abstract, and it also sounds a bit pretentious…but it’s not. Why do Sadhus meditate their whole life? Because it’s a life. Meditating is virtual life, a life in another dimension. And I think that the world of physics will prove that. Through that, society will give more place for shamans, for people who experience that alternate reality. That is the answer for this broken system of ours that believes so much in materiality.
For us humans, the perfect life would be the middle, in between the materialistic and the spiritual. But now things are totally unbalanced in favour of matter.
GS You said that metaphysics and physics deliver the same answers. Do you also think they employ the same mechanisms in finding those answers? Are physics and metaphysics the same process?
AD At the beginning, physics was just a way of expressing how the world functions. I remember when I saw my grandfather writing books, he was always writing down formulas. And that’s a total abstraction. If you really think about those formulas, they’re just a way of explaining the world in an abstract language.
But now the physicist’s questions are the same as the spiritualist’s. Considering that matter is only energy, the question now is, what is the most vital, the most primordial—mind or energy? And it’s exactly the question you’re answering when you’re meditating. Physics is an abstract language used to explain the world, while meditation is the actual witnessing of an explanation of the world. So they’re not the same processes.
LS In the first part of the interview, we talked about femininity and feminism—themes that you dealt with in your EP Conscious Cunt, which was released before your album. To broaden that topic, what, for you, is political music?
AD Political music is music that is conscious of where it comes from. We as electronic musicians come from quite a middle-class background. I don’t know anyone working in electronic music who has had a “survival life”. Coming from that privileged scene and having the possibility to express, we should use this platform to express. But I wouldn’t call mere expression political, yet. Music is political as long as the artist is politicised. Of course you can make a track called “Save Tibet” or “Save the Planet”—maybe I’ll do that someday. But for me it’s not necessarily about the words of a track. It’s more about where the artist is placing herself in the scene.
It’s important to be political in our little, everyday gestures. I don’t think that there’s political music, per se—there are only political scenes. And electronic music now belongs to a political scene. That’s what I see with promoters, other artists, and the parties we go to. There’s a feeling of commitment, a kind of common energy. And I think we’re building a really strong scene that will offer a lot of interesting new possibilities for society. I really recognize myself in that scene. I couldn’t be happier with music right now. Music has regained the role of a ritual gathering, and I think that it’s begun to leave the ‘strictly entertainment’ area. It’s more about things happening and people changing—about having an impact. Our scene is politicized through a common discourse.
GS There are often symbols at work in your visual self-presentation and in your press pictures. To what extent do you aim for a clear and fixed use of symbols? Or for an ambiguous one? The swastika appears a lot, for example…
AD On the cover of the album, my name is written in Devanagari, the Hindi alphabet. I just love the writing—the scripture and the gesture. So visual decisions often are just made impulsively.
But the use of symbols should be very clear. With the swastika it was actually about not being ambiguous at all—I used it to raise reactions. In India the swastika is basically everywhere. It’s the symbol of the wheel of life, the whole eternity. But I remember being quite shocked when I saw an Indian swastika in a YouTube video and somebody wrote, “aww this fucking Nazi symbol”. There are still people who connect the Swastika exclusively to National Socialism, not realizing that the symbol was taken and abused by the Nazis. So it’s very… I think I wanted to provoke reactions and open up a space in which to explain to people what the symbol is. Actually I was expecting more people not to know what it was, but I’m also quite happy that didn’t happen.
There are sacred forms and sacred geometries—like the swastika or the pyramid—that connect us with our origin as humans. And they have an impact on our unconscious. Again, I don’t want to sound too pretentious, but the idea was to tell people to refocus on our own logos as mankind—the Merkabah is another example. And to suggest that we try to understand those as well, besides just our current icons and logos like Kim Kardashian or the McDonalds M. We should refocus on the idea that we all have a strong spiritual connection. I would like people to dive into that knowledge, to understand our common history as humans—history way in the past, before our modern era.
This is not a reappropriation by a nation, an ethnos, or a group, but by and of our own knowledge. Knowledge about symbols, rituals, and ritualistic music has all gotten lost…our modern rituals, for example, are totally corrupt. They’re totally formatted and receive diplomas or first place in a contest. Those are our new rituals, but I think we should come back to birth and death rituals, ancient gatherings. So when I’m saying that I have a strong interest in ritual music somewhere in Asia, then I mean it as a reappropriation of our own, common background as humans and not just of my own roots. The whole collective consciousness—that’s what I’m trying to regain, partly through the use of symbols.
Teil II: Tianzhuo Chen
GS How did your work with Aïsha come about? Had you been aware of her music before?
Tianzhuo Chen The collaboration began after I received an email from Aisha one day. She said that she’d seen my work online and wanted to ask me for a collaboration in the form of a music video. I only became aware of her music after clicking the Soundcloud link in her email. But then I was immediately in love with her stuff.
LS You’ve used similar settings and actors in different contexts (e.g. in your work 19:53 and Picnic) as you did in the video for “Mazdâ”. How important was Aïsha’s music itself in making the video or in developing the performance at CTM Festival?
TC The music video is actually made out of my older video work. We didn’t get the chance or budget to shoot a new video at that time, so I decided to use my previous work and to edit something new out of it for the “Mazdâ” video. But as I see it, the music could be the soul of the work—without the right music, the work would be meaningless.
LS Aïsha raises a lot of different topics in her work—we spoke about feminism or identity, for example, in the first part of the interview. She often raises those topics as a political statement…
TC My work is about religion and belief. It points to my own experience with that. So you could say I’m less concerned with political topics. In the meantime, though, everything is about politics—being an artist is political, as is being religious.
GS Spirituality is as much a lifestyle these days as consumerism is—at least in the Western part of the world. Nevertheless, Aïsha sees her work and spirituality as different ways of looking at things…can you speak a bit about your experience of this situation in Beijing or in China in general?
TC I think the situation is pretty much the same in China—or it’s even worse. China is westernizing and globalizing. In a rapidly developing country, spirituality is far behind consumerism. It has been forgotten for a long time. Spirituality becomes more like a lifestyle for a minority, a tool to satisfy people’s secular wishes, or it is ignored completely.
GS How do you see these two things—consumerism and materialism vs. spirituality—represented in the “Mazdâ” video, and also in your work at large?
TC In my work, this duality always exists in parallel. The core of the work is about my belief and connected spiritual topics, but on the other hand the method and mode of presenting those topics in the work are very much on materialism’s side. I adopted those methods from our pop- and subcultures. The whole thing is like a contemporary religion that also absorbs our everyday consumption.
LS Aïsha talks about iconoclasm through the use of symbols—do you take a similar approach?
TC Yes, I think this is one of the most common points in our two bodies of work, even if we use different media. When we use symbols—our shared Tibetan and Hindu symbols, for example—in the video, they have been taken out of their original context and reconstructed into something totally free. The symbol is free from its original iconic meaning and becomes merged with an updated ideology.