When I first meet Villette Dasha at a bar on a Friday afternoon, I can't help but feel in awe of her already. About 15 minutes earlier, I had sat in a room, donned a pair of virtual reality goggles, and was thrown into an immersive music video in which she strutted around like a badass and stole all of my money.
Dasha, an Auckland-born, Hamilton-raised DJ, producer and singer, has teamed up with Red Bull Music to release a 360-degree virtual reality music video to accompany her new single, Money. The video throws the viewer into a hyper-real dreamscape, assuming a first-person perspective in Dasha's seductive, hypnotic world.
The 22-year-old has been making waves with her slickly produced RnB, both here and abroad, most recently with her Drip Crimson mixtape. She began her journey with music from a young age, taking lessons in piano, guitar and dance. As a teenager, hip-hop and RnB piqued her interest. "I was like, 'I want to make beats,' because no one was sending me beats, and I was sick of just being the girl with the guitar," she says.
"I moved from Hamilton to Auckland, went to Mainz, learnt how to use Ableton [music software], and then it kind of just took off," she says. "I just started making beats in my bedroom and sending them away. I made trap music for a while and started sending them to rappers. Eventually I started to make music for myself."