Press Photo by Mike Gustafson
Early Praise for Masma Dream World:
“A matrix of lucid electronics.. On PLEASE COME TO ME, Masma Dream World plumbs the abyssal depths of the divine feminine, charting a path of devotion to the Mother Kali” - The Wire ‘Cover Story’
"music rooted in drones and ritual rhythms..like a visitor probing a dark cavern, occasionally knocking something loose that clatters noisily into the void" - The New York Times
"a strange, discomfiting document of the singer-composer’s energy..tangles together traditional African sounds and rhythms with Western electronic styles ranging from ambient to harsh noise" - The FADER
"a divine, spectral source of unease..“mother” is the only lyric in the song, but it hits you like a paragraph, rummaging through your skin until it crawls" - Paste Magazine
"The astonishing new record from Masma Dream World obliterates all genres to arrive at something haunting, potent, and powerful." - Bandcamp Daily
“by turns meditative, tortured, and exultant, it transmutes the abyssal language of devotion and the divine feminine through cavernous electronics, spine-chilling noise, and a powerful voice” - Our Culture
“a striking and viscerally powerful experience” - Outside Left
Today, Masma Dream World has announced her new EP, A GRAVE IN A LUCKY SITE, due out Sept 26th via Valley of Search. A limited-edition cassette release of PLEASE COME TO ME will also feature the 3 new tracks. To preview the collection, she’s shared “KALA,” a transportative reverie of atmospheric drones and vocal chants. The EP’s three songs are culled from the same sessions that yielded PLEASE COME TO ME, her sophomore album released earlier this year to critical acclaim, including a coveted spot on the cover of The Wire Magazine. The album was born from an extensive period of time spent deepening her spirituality through meditation, Hindu mysticism, and Advaita Vedantic texts.
“Knowledge is a destination beyond the thick veil of suffering, a treacherous path that treads lifetimes on different timelines, always reaching for the divine,” she shares. “You travel it until you meet a death that is final, and you realize that you were never born.”
Masma Dream World is the experimental project led by Bhakta artist, producer and healer Devi Mambouka. 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. 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.
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.
WATCH “KALA” OFFICIAL VISUALIZER | 
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