Heith - X, Wheel (2022)

Heith’s devout interest in the notion of reality started long before he recorded his latest album. The Italian musician, producer and artist probed the spiritual aspects of sound and its cosmogonic potential already in his previous works released on his own Haunter Records label.

Exploring the textures of consciousness through research into the ritual animism, he kept an omnivorous and universalist approach to cultural and sonic influence. This is central to X, wheel, Heith’s debut album and first release on PAN. It’s a deep dive into his creative and spiritual practice, one where art and life are inextricable.

Written and recorded across different studios in Milan, Rome and Florence between March, 2019, and January, 2020, eleven tracks cycle through a world of stylistic references—from psychedelia, psytrance and freak folk to stoner metal, noise and early electronic music—while remaining firmly a part of a singular vision.

Album opener “Letter 4” staggers along collaborator Leonardo Rubboli’s winding guitar melody, while second track “Dero” cycles into layers of assorted sine wave lines and tonal systems outside of the Western diatonic scales. X, wheel sits calmly at the centre of its own vortex of dissonance and diversity, moving through a spectrum of ideas, moods, and emotional states with uncanny ease. A glimpse of contributor Jesse Osborne- Lanthier’s synth melody briefly surfaces from a cacophonous flood of reverb and distortion on “Stoned Witch”. Aase Nielsen’s lonely saxophone wanders around the nostalgic hypnagogic noir of “Ensemble For Somnambulists”.

Heith draws together an array of philosophies and fictions together into a sonic tableau that exists outside of linear time. As the titular wheel spins, it does not bring about repetition, rather constant change and movement, spiralling into infinity.

The hypnotic nature of the release is translated in the album’s liner notes. It’s a collage of sorts, constructed from Heith’s own diary entries using the non-phonetic alphabet and linguistic experiment called “Angel’s Hair” developed with artist Pietro Agostoni. Together with contributions from ZU drummer Jacopo Battaglia and didgeridoo player Fabio Goldaniga, X, wheel is an exercise in creating new forms of meaning through sound, turning spectral vibration into conscious awareness.