Joep Beving - Henosis (2019) [Hi-Res]

HENOSIS, Joep Beving’s closing chapter in a trilogy of albums – marking the end of an intensely personal four-year spiritual and philosophical exploration.

“This is my journey, and my search for understanding,” says Beving, the acclaimed composer/pianist who rose to eminence in 2015 thanks to millions of streams of the contemplative, atmospheric album, Solipsism. By now he is one of the most streamed pianists in the world.

“I believe that the answers are much more on the inside,” he explains. “So this journey, in a way, is also an internal one. My hope is to give people a space to be in for a couple of minutes or hours where they feel things just seem to be right, like a recognition that they’re understood or that they can just be.”

On HENOSIS the Dutch composer continues his minimalist and at times romantic style of writing, but this time explores new territories. It sets off where his sophomore album, Prehension, left us - the warm intimate sound of the Schimmel piano Beving inherited from his grandmother. With the help of producer Gijs van Klooster and through collaborations with Cappella Amsterdam, Echo Collective and Maarten Vos, Joep Beving opens up new musical worlds using orchestral and electronic sounds alongside the familiar piano. Listen to the album’s first single, “Into The Dark Blue”.

His debut album, Solipsism, investigates the self and how it is related to the other by trying to show we have a shared understanding of what it is to be human. For Prehension, Beving describes realizing he had zoomed out from the individual level to the level of the collective. HENOSIS is the last step, in which Beving’s destination is the vastness of the cosmos – that great, black void – in search of “ultimate reality and emptiness of the mind”.

Fittingly, given the concepts behind it, HENOSIS is a vast, sprawling double album of twenty-two tracks that gently draw the listener in and lead the way, from the calm, contemplative “Into The Dark Blue” to the otherworldly “Klangfall”. The deeper one travels, the grander the themes become; “Apophis”, a tense, drawn out blend of electronics and mournful strings, embodies evil and darkness while “Aeon”, the track that opens CD two, represents the battle against that very evil almost like an “intergalactic warfare between good and bad, with a choir praising wisdom and truth.” “Nebula” – written and produced together with Maarten Vos, and one of Beving’s boldest, most experimental tracks to date – takes us even further, “a harrowing trip” to the very limit of both the cosmos and our mind.

Beving’s quest is “a genuine longing for truthfulness and for existential essence”. “We’re all part of one thing, we’re all connected. And so we need to love each ourselves, each other, and this world we inhabit.”

Joep Beving, piano