The last surviving boreal forests of the American Midwest are described by one local tourist board as the perfect playground for “fishing, boating, snowmobiling … and just plain relaxing”. But “just plain relaxing” is the last feeling that comes to mind journeying down the psychotropic rabbit hole that is Please Come To Me, the extraordinary second album by Masma Dream World’s Devi Mambouka, which the Wisconsin-based composer and multi-disciplinary artist began working on amid the great green nowhere of the state’s ancient Northwoods.
Masma Dream World’s defining sound is the very opposite of a bucolic meander through the outdoors. It is a consciousness-expanding blend of chanting, percussion and field recordings – a collage shaped by Mambouka’s African and Asian heritage and with an overlay of Catholic mysticism and Hindi spirituality. Together, these heady influences conjure the sense of a waking vision from which there is no escaping. The effect is intense and sometimes claustrophobic. This is ominous music where a jump-scare forever threatens but never quite manifests. But goodness is it a trip that stays with you.
The Northwoods of Wisconsin are just the latest stop-off in a life of journey and discovery for Mambouka. She lived for many years in the Bronx: one of the inspirations for the new LP is a collection of tapings of old spiritual lectures discovered at her mother’s apartment in New York. The artist (who uses both ‘she’ and ‘they’ pronounces) had, in turn, come to America having spent a significant part of her childhood in Gabon in Central Africa.
There, she was exposed to the country’s indigenous music traditions and the lingering echo of Catholicism, a legacy of European conquest. Those ghosts, both native and colonial, drift through Please Come To Me’s opening track, ‘Only Wish’. Wraith-like tendrils of rhythm are interwoven with an incorporeal coo that has the fantastically disconcerting quality of a Gregorian chant heard from the bottom of a well.
The sensation of journeying between the visible and the incorporeal worlds is even more striking on ‘Hell Bells’. Multi-tracked vocals suggesting a goth Enya are framed by a deep, ominous drone. Then come a grim swell of church bells on ‘Pordeno Me’, accompanied by vocals with the eerie quality of secrets whispered just out of ear-shot.
Alongside her childhood experience of Christian ritual – she attended a Catholic school – Mambouka draws on her Singapore-born mother’s Bengali and Canton heritage. Some of her most precious childhood memories are of visiting Hindu temples with her mother and being immersed in devotional music. Those experiences resurface on the drowsy choral refrain at the beginning of ‘PLEASE COME TO ME’. You can hear them, too, in the hazy flutter of ‘O, Dark Mother’, as dulcet singing contrasts with a phantasmal vibrating bassline. Here are songs of praise for the end of times.
The cumulative effect is beautifully otherworldly. In a recent interview, Mambouka recalled how a live performance was derailed when a freaked-out sound engineer pulled the plug – so discombobulated was he by the quiet chaos unleashed on stage. The judicious listener will feel no such compunction. They will instead want to stay by Mambouka’s side as she hurtles towards catharsis with the hallucinogenic chamber-pop of ‘The Last Poet’ and then, on closing track, ‘Without A Body’, fuses skittish rhythms with wordless incantations. It makes for an unsettling conclusion to a record that ripples with light and dark – an experience that will haunt the imagination like a half-remembered dream.
