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Mal Devisa is the songwriting, liberation, and poetry project of multifarious artist Deja Carr. At age 12, Carr began playing music when she and a group of friends started an all-female band called Who’da Funk It? After five years of performing, writing, and recording, Carr began to learn bass as she compiled scraps of her forgotten songs. Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, the solo project Mal Devisa was soon born out of slanted basement walls and busted, dusty kick drums.
Starting in 2014 and breaking through with 2016’s Kiid, Mal Devisa’s work spans a self-made spectrum of sound from gravitic, soulful rock to soliloquy to unabashed hip hop. Although known for her unmistakable, smouldering voice and loop-based, bass-forward compositions, Carr’s talents also extend to reaches of poetry and production, paralleled by aspirations to start both a youth foundation and Afrobeat orchestra.
The sound is a maelstrom of genre-defiant magic that spans jazz, folk, hip hop, and experimental forms. Carr’s lyrics are cleverly verbose, their delivery like lightning whispering into the haunting DIY spaces where Mal Devisa cut her teeth. Such boundless inspiration and style are central facets of Mal Devisa’s work, whose sonically and narratively unrestrained passages teem with empathy and liberatory visions for a better world.
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