Masma Dream World is the solo recording project of multi-disciplinary artist and degree Sound therapist Devi Mambouka. Born to a Gabonese father and a Singaporean mother, Devi (pronounced: day-vee), is a child of the world who learned to tap into their inner magic to overcome trauma, abuse, and addiction.
"The first time I remembered a dream, I was six years old in my home country of Gabon. The scene was dark and engulfed in smoke like an imagined hell. As I wandered, monstrous figures appeared from the shadows.
Scared, I opened my mouth. At the sound of my voice, the demons burst into flames as I journeyed through this hell.
What truly scared me: I couldn't hear my voice.
I dreamed this again when my parents divorced at age nine. The third and final time I returned to the dream was on the passing of my father. I was 12 and living in the Bronx.
As a little child, I sang to trees. After a period of silence, I sang again in my teenage years. Maybe I was trying to sing to those trees again. I found myself lost in a new city so I lost myself in records stores, in books on magic, in Vedic texts. Those wanderings led to the nightlife of NYC.
Years later, while healing the pain of a broken heart in Mystic, Connecticut, I finally heard the sound of my voice from that childhood dream: music for the shadow world.
In 2020, the Play At Night album was born."
-Devi Mambouka, Seeker
After their release of the Debut Album "Play At Night" in 2020, Devi has toured worldwide as a solo performer and as well been a support artist for Duma in their month-long US 2022 tour, Masma Dream World has performed at international festivals Le Guess Who?, REWIRE, Transmission Waves Festival, Raw Power Festival, Afrofuturism Festival presented by Carnegie Hall, to name a few.
They are currently working on presenting their new performance art piece.
New Standards Men make music that defies simple genre categorization. Its threading together and fusing of multiple streams of influence has produced a music that has the subversive spirit of punk, psychedelia and the avant-garde, the technical prowess of jazz and metal and all informed by a sense of humor and disregard for stylistic convention. All while creating a prolific and surprisingly coherent and strong body of work including its 2020 and 2021 companion albums I Was A Starship and Spain's First Astronaut respectively. The group came together in late 2016 when current members Drew Bissell and Jeremy Brashaw started jamming with another friend to produce music that drew on a desire to make music through a sort of improvisational/spontaneous composition approach that continues in the writing process to this day. The aforementioned albums were written and recorded during the same session but with the music having a slightly different flavor, one more heavy, psychedelic doom jazz, the other more John Zorn-esque free jazz. Companions in mood but clearly different facets of the New Standards Men sound.