Les Immortelles • Aïsha Devi • In Death’s Eyes

At CTM Festival 2024’s closing concert festival favourite Aïsha Devi will present her new album Death is Home on Houndstooth, her first LP since 2018 and what the artist has voiced is her most personal work yet. Harnessing timeless frequencies, Devi channels crystalline HD bass motifs and weightless vocals in a sonic manifesto towards healing and forging a path for an alternate, more hospitable reality beyond the human condition. Devi will close out the festival in a world premiere live performance with engrossing scenography. Petra Hermanova’s new release, In Death’s Eyes, combines folk and sacred musical technique and instrumentation which drift between song and heavy distorted drones. Performing on autoharp and voice, the SHAPE+ supported artist, will be accompanied by Jon Eirik Boska (percussion and voice) and the organist Elizaveta Suslova as they perform material from the album. To Hermanova, religious music offers spiritual solace from grief, but folk speaks to the human and earthly as told by the individual, through songs of suffering or joy, sin or salvation. With lyrics riddled with symbolism and allusion and contrasting the affordable and easy-to-master autoharp with the gargantuan organ reserved for skilled performers, In Death’s Eyes blends and contrasts the sounds of transcendence with the worldly, poignantly expressing Hermanova’s struggle for spiritual resolution against the reality of death and loss.

Petra Hermanova is supported by SHAPE+ which is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.