Play at Night

Play at Night is a remarkable release that questions roots, routine and reality. Artist Devi Mambouka grew up in Gabon, where she felt constrained by expectations to become a mother. In her words, ‘there are no other options’ She moved to the Bronx at 12, and her immersion in new sounds through her teenage years acted as an escape from this early conditioning.

Vocal prowess is accompanied by frenetic percussive work throughout. The thick vocal layers of ‘Back Home’ mutate and evolve, resulting in a contorted passage redolent of the eerie uncanny of David Lynch’s oeuvre. Mambouka’s training as a butoh dancer is apparent on ‘Knight Wolf’ with its resonant drum hits cutting across long cathartic calls and chanting. Its centrepiece is ‘Theta’, inspired by the malleable early stages of a child’s life where ideas and ideologies are in flux. Built upon breath and shattering sub bass, textural motifs build to a cacophonous climax that quickly atrophies. Its use of electronics to construct mood is masterful: ‘Sleeping Whale’ is soaked in rich granular manipulations of mechanical sound that you can almost reach out and touch; ‘Becoming the Magician’ is simply entrancing. To Play at Night is to embrace the otherworldly. Here, Mambouka confounds her past and finds new life in the shadows.