Text by Katazyna Jankovska
Every ritual in ancient times used technology. Drumming and percussion usually played central roles in those practices. With a symbolic meaning attached, percussion was used in the rituals of the transitions of social life, the transmission of important messages, the passage of solar time, and many others. Today, electronic music continues this tradition. Through rhythm, immersion, and repetitive loops that echo the ancient patterns of ritual music, it creates experiences of collective connection and healing in clubs or performance venues, seen as the most contemporary expression of ritual music. In our fast-paced, disconnected world, it serves as a secular sanctuary, bringing people together to undergo contemporary rituals.
Many contemporary electronic music artists engage with this practice by connecting it to their spiritual traditions, ancestral memories, and generational trauma. Their work often becomes a form of resistance, rediscovering their heritage and reconnecting with cultural roots through sound and storytelling. These artists often highlight intimate narratives, giving voice to those historically excluded from written history. By merging digital tools and ancient techniques, repetitive loops and carefully selected frequencies that mimic the ancient power of shamans, these artists create realms where the present-day and the ancient coexist, using storytelling as a means of reclamation and collective healing.
Becoming a New Year tradition, the eighth edition of FIBER x The Rest is Noise in January presented two audiovisual performances focused on spirituality, indigenous and ritual cultures, and healing. The long-awaited premiere of Thức Tỉnh (Vietnamese for “awakening”) by Animistic Beliefs and Jeisson Drenth and Les Immortelles by Aïsha Devi with scenography and lighting design by Emmanuel Biard explored the potential of new techniques, merging traditional and contemporary art forms in a reclamation of cultural roots and sharing their personal histories. These performances provided a platform for subdued stories, reflecting on displacement, intergenerational trauma, non-Western cosmologies, and subjectivity in the digital age, creating new narratives outside of Western normative frameworks. Their artistic journeys went beyond mere performance—it was a spiritual exploration.
In a pretalk to the show, storytelling is a technology, says Jeisson Drenth. Thức Tỉnh presents narrated personal stories of Linh Luu and Marvin Lalihatu (who form the musical duo Animistic Beliefs) and Jeisson Drenth, making the performance almost autobiographical. Similar to their previous work CACHE/SPIRIT, it features stories inspired by social issues, colonialism and their journeys and is informed by pre-colonial traditions and Marvin’s Moluccan, Linh’s Vietnamese-Chinese, and Jeisson’s Pre-Columbian heritage.
Stepping out of their usual roles—Animistic Beliefs at the music controllers and Jeisson crafting the visuals—they created a performance that, unfolding in different sections, combines acoustic and electronic instruments, spoken word, dance, shadow puppetry and visuals. Instead of relying solely on music and screen-based visuals usually prevalent in audiovisual shows, the performance emphasises the active presence of the performers themselves, using movement, spoken word and carefully thought-through, symbolic stage design. Stepping out of the dark club setting into the spotlight was a vulnerable moment but an impactful connection with the audience.
In the opening scene of the Thức Tỉnh, Linh creates live calligraphy on an 11-meter-long scroll, entering the stage wearing a mask symbolising their inner demons. With significant movements, they inscribe words that reflect their journey toward growth and self-acceptance. As the performance unfolds, Linh begins to shed their demon-like attire, removing the mask as they complete the writing and walking away as themselves.
Marvin takes the stage wearing an oversized mask inspired by their nightmares and traditional Moluccan warrior attire made from Ikat fabric woven with dyed threads. Performatively moving around a gong—central to many ritual practices, sometimes used to evoke ghosts and banish demons—their performance references their Moluccan heritage. The gong’s deep vibrations are believed to connect with universal energy, helping with healing and transformation.
Theatrically switching between different sections of the performance, a sculpture resembling a huge hand fan is rolled onto the stage. Ratri Notosudirdjo and Magdalena Petrova perform live shadow puppetry inspired by Vietnamese water puppetry. While using this ancient form of storytelling, a precursor to digital projections, Linh narrates a personal story. In the piece that undoubtedly touched everyone in the audience, they recount a text message from their father, who apologised for being unable to understand how to make them happy, as his view of happiness differed from theirs. This unresolved conversation, a source of disconnection, is continued in the performance as Linh expresses the words they wished they could have said. Their father heard this continuation for the first time, with the performance becoming an active means to seek reconciliation and healing.
Jeisson stepped away from their usual role as a visual artist, contributing to the performance by playing ceramic flute and piano. Telling a story in the native language, the visuals of the dried deserts of southern Colombia were projected behind. As Jeisson states, the choice to perform in Spanish was intentional, allowing one to reach closer to oneself. The artist says that focusing on expression rather than reaction is more liberating to me [1]. The performance concluded with the trio returning to their familiar roles—Linh and Marvin playing familiar rhythms we know them for and Jeisson creating the visuals. The visuals drew inspiration from places dear to the performers, with Jeisson combining found footage and custom 3D landscapes created in Unreal Engine to construct immersive settings that connected to their personal narratives.
Unlike the high-energy, visceral performances of Animistic Beliefs, Thức Tỉnh created a space for contemplation. The deliberate pacing, arrangement minimised distractions, and the use of different techniques played well with immersing the audience into the story, while for artists themselves, the focus was on embracing experimentation rather than achieving a final result.
Similar to Thức Tỉnh, Aïsha Devi’s performance Les Immortelles was a synthesis of her personal story, identity struggles, feelings of not belonging and deeper metaphysical exploration, based on her latest album Death Is Home. Born in Switzerland with Nepali Indigenous heritage, growing up surrounded by violence and isolation, music offered her a place to breathe freely and set her own rules. Aïsha’s work, focused on sound healing and ritual spaces, is deeply informed by the Eastern spirituality of her Nepalese-Tibetan ancestry, Hindu texts, meditation, alchemy, shamanism, healing frequencies, and ancient philosophies. Though not religious herself, Aïsha sees a common thread across these belief systems—using self-hypnosis or entrancement to reach higher states of being.
This is especially evident in her latest album. Serving as the foundation for the performance, the album is based on Aïsha’s attempts to search for her deceased father, B.K. Gurung, a Nepali drummer whom she never knew. Playing an invisible but fundamental role in her life, being a god and a hero, he represented a possibility—as Aïsha says—of being else. He helped her grow up by reminding her that she did not belong to the Western world and that it was a collapsing society. The album thus became a prayer of thanks to her father. With the album’s title suggesting a rebirth and rejecting Western society’s rationality and materiality, Aïsha encourages listeners to accept death as a natural part of life and reconnect with the infinite state—through sound, rituals and celebrations.
The performance features lighting design and scenography from Emmanuel Biard, with flowing fabric sculptures animated by windblowers. Using the harsh electronic sounds and the vocal as her most powerful tool, Aïsha aims to move beyond the body’s physical limitations towards a place of weightlessness. She calls this sound “aetherave,” referring to the fifth element “aether”, using the sound to transcend matter and connect with the eternal. With dramatically flowing fabric, strobe lights, heavy beats and healing frequencies of her voice, she created almost a sanctuary for marginalised people, a place to cleanse the body and the mind.
From a neuroscientific perspective, the power of electronic music lies in its repetitive, rhythmic patterns, which engage the brain’s default mode network and other regions linked to relaxation. The repetitive soundscapes from traditional instruments or digital beats stimulate alpha brainwaves, promoting relaxation and light meditation. These frequencies extend their influence beyond the mind, resonating with the body at a cellular level, affecting bones, DNA, and even the body’s magnetic field.
Aïsha has long explored the power of sound to heal. Learning from Tibetan monk rituals, she developed a technique of harnessing specific variations in vocal vibrations. In opposition to what Aïsha calls “parasitic” quotidian frequencies of devices like phones, computers and other electrical appliances, as well as music that is intentionally used to provoke consumerist desires, her use of those frequencies is to heal and dissolve the boundaries between the material and immaterial. Devi sees such ways of working with sound, especially binaural frequencies—creating a difference between what we hear in the right and left ear—to induce the state of supra-consciousness. Her grandfather, a supraconductivity theoretician Charles Paul Enz, described the concept as an extension of superconductivity, describing a state where resistance is infinite and immeasurable.
Thus, reaching the state of supra-consciousness is the transcendence of individual consciousness towards a universal one. Mixing ancestral knowledge and physics using specific frequencies, both from her personal history, Aïsha uses their potential to alter consciousness, unlocking higher-dimensional perception and promoting healing through resonance.
The two performances created a space for mutual understanding and collective healing. Using different techniques, whether the power of storytelling or one of frequencies, and bringing spirituality and technology together, they reaffirmed the idea of audiovisual performances as a medium for contemporary rituals. As Aïsha reflected in an interview, highlighting the role of electronic music artists: I think the revolution will be frequential, and we could be these modern shamans [2]. Bringing this idea to life, she invited everyone to stand up during the final song, ending the show with a collective dance—a celebratory ritual of healing and connection.
