Masma Dream World has shared the third preview of her new album, PLEASE COME TO ME, due out February 21st via Valley of Search. Opening with a field recording of church bells in Pordenone, Italy, today’s “Pordeno Me” builds tension with strangled vocals and dense atmospherics.
“In the darkest corners of isolation, pain, and despair, my cries for my mother echoed into the abyss. Instead of succumbing to the void, a force unknown to me at the time, saved me from my final attempt to escape this mortal coil,” shares Devi Mambouka on the new single.
The experimental project led by Mambouka, Masma Dream World turned heads with her 2020 debut Play at Night, a record that established the multi-instrumentalist as a singular voice, combining field recordings, throttling bass, skittering electronics and traditional Gabonese rhythms for an awe inspiring, transportative sound. Previous single “PLEASE COME TO ME” is an aural ritual, an invocation to the mother of the universe and a communion with the unseen world. The track was highlighted at The FADER, Paste Magazine, Bandcamp Daily, and The New York Times.
With roots in Gabon and Singapore, Mambouka is a child of the world. She recalls rainforest rituals and the presence of ghosts and spirits throughout her childhood in Gabon before immigrating to The Bronx. Here, instead of forests, she lost herself in record stores and began a spiritual, educational journey, DJing and immersing herself in NYC’s nightlife. A former Catholic school student, she studied religions of all kinds but found her guides in magic, maternal Hindu ancestors, the Black Madonna and Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, and the mother of the forgotten ones.
PLEASE COME TO ME was culled from sessions over the course of two weekends with no specific concept in mind, but the result was years in the making, time focused on deepening her spirituality through meditation, Hindu mysticism, and Advaita Vedantic texts. At the same time, she was learning the craft, training in sound therapy, audio engineering, and sound design. The technical developing alongside the spiritual, the electronic with the natural. Her father was from the indigenous Bahoumbou tribe of Gabon, while her mother is Bengali and Cantonese from Singapore. Her influences are global in scope. The mystical experiences of her travels are incorporated into the music, like the church bells on today’s single, or spontaneous singing inspired by a visit to La Vierge Noire (the Black Madonna) in Rocamadour, France. While walking through a cave, the spirits led her to record her voice, so she pulled out her phone. That recording appears on “The Island Where the Goddess Lives” and the sound is echoey and distant, reversed language going back through time. There are field recordings from her visits with her family in Singapore and the temples and rice paddy fields of Bali.
In the isolation of a bitter Wisconsin winter surrounded by the Northwoods, her connections to the spiritual unseen world deepened. When she returned to her mother’s apartment in New York City, she stumbled upon old, damaged tapes of spiritual lectures from her late aunt’s collection and saw it as a sign to begin work on the album.
This past October, Devi shared her first Masma Dream World single since her 2020 debut, the thunderous and ceremonial “Ancient DNA,” and her first for the venerableValley of Search, the experimental label run by Nabil Ayers and home to Alan Braufman, Patricia Brennan, and Tomas Nordmark.
