Listening to Devi Mambouka, known as Masma Dream World, is bearing witness to a personal journey through hell and back. “In the darkest corners of isolation, pain, and despair, my cries for my mother echoed into the abyss. Instead of succumbing to the void, I was found by the goddess, who saved me from my final attempt to escape this mortal coil.” PLEASE COME TO ME is an invitation to a private ritual of healing, an invocation to the ancestors, and a communion with nature. They are the sounds of an elemental longing, and it will haunt you. As a child in Gabon, she sang to the trees, and her music transports you into the depths of the forest in the night, a scary but thrilling place to get lost. She would hear and see ghosts in her father’s house, and she still hears the spirits.
At ten, she remembers joining a celebration/ritual in the middle of the rainforest. The other children told her the mokoukwe would be coming, a tall bird-like masked character covered in raffia who would hit children they deemed bad or special in some way. Through the sound of the drums and the women singing, she heard a rusting sound in the bushes. When the creature (man? woman? spirit? animal?) emerged from the forest, she feared it could see right through her, able to see if she was good or not.
And then…
Boom!
It hit me!
Like the other children, she immediately started screaming and running, not with fear but a sense of liberation. “We were free, we were wild.” Even as a child, she was tapped to be special and break rules in the best possible way. There is a fierce rebellion in her music. Her sister told her she couldn’t sing, so she started singing. The story of Masma Dream World begins with a recurring nightmare that began when she was six. In the dream, she wandered through a hellish landscape engulfed in smoke and darkness. Monstrous figures emerged from the shadows, and she opened her mouth in terror. The demons burst into flames at the sound of her voice, but it was a voice she couldn’t hear, and that’s what frightened her Most.
The dream surfaced again at nine during her parents’ divorce. It came one last time when they immigrated to America. It was there, in The Bronx, where she started to sing again. But instead of forests, she lost herself in records stores and began a spiritual, educational journey. A former Catholic school student, she studied religions of all kinds but found her guides in magic, maternal Brahmin ancestors, the Black Madonna and Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, and the mother of the forgotten ones. Always mothers. She would meditate in the dark, returning to the forest, looking for her mother’s attention and affection. She heard music in the air and wrote it down, telling the story the spirits wanted her to convey.
With her debut album Play at Night she tapped into those experiences, molding her pain and trauma into music. Her past informs and feeds the sound of her present. Inspired by the Japanese spirit-led performance art of butoh, the album is a theta-wave meditation encompassing multiple cultures and languages. Beats and bells, chants and wails, it’s the music of a mystical practice all her own. Tracks like Unwind, The Council, and 333 AM evoke a guided meditation into the deeper crevices of the mind. Theta is a conjuring, alluring, and unsettling at the same time. Rest in Peace is a mourning lament and a cry out in the dark, a reoccurring theme.
PLEASE COME TO ME was recorded 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 Vedantic texts. At the same time, she was learning the craft, training in sound therapy, audio engineering, and sound design. The technical developing with 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; the church bells in Pordenone, Italy, appear on PordenoMe. While in Rocamadour, France, she had a powerful healing experience after seeing La Vierge Noire (the Black Madonna) and had the urge to sing. 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, which can be heard in What if it was true.
Only Wish is haunting—a dreamy, painful longing, deep vibration under a pleading wail. Seeking Your Protection sounds like a call to worship: horns, drums, footsteps on stone, and ghostly jangling chains. Its whispered voices are harsh and throaty, angry and guttural. Primordial sounds. The album’s titular track begins like a beckoning meditation that grows in intensity and ends on a sharp inhale, breathing in and out, leaping out of the silence, like jump scares. Don’t get too comfortable. Ancient DNA begins with a low-frequency rumbling felt in the gut, followed by the repetition of irregular rhythmic tapping, the recorded sound of water falling in her mother’s bathtub. It’s an intimate, personal sound. PLEASE COME TO ME beacons you to come into the darkness, inviting you into Devi Mambouka’s personal abyss. It’s music you hear in the middle of the night, happening upon a ritual already in progress, music meant to put you in a trance.
There’s a kinship I recognize in MDW’s music, performance, and rituals. Her gothic love affair with the darkness, the mysteries, walking right up to the abyss and peeking inside with awe and curiosity. She doesn’t run from pain, but straight towards it and through, using it as a tool for creation and transcendence. She walks alongside the ghosts and sings to them. Music for the shadow world. Songs you experience, not just listen to. It demands participation. MDW reaches deep-down to the interior of herself at its most vulnerable proving that sorrow can be transformative, and music can heal. The once silent voice of her childhood nightmares is loud and clear now, a voice that can set fire to monsters.
Leila Taylor
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