HA : ZE - Healers
We start by boarding a friend, the imagination, and putting it at the centre of a chat, intense, along with the story, and then turn the whole thing around in the capital of Latvia, Riga, entering the rooms, mental first and physical later, of a musician and producer, almost unconscious son of that city that trafficked with life in a really difficult way during the Second World War, with thousands of Jews condemned to an unjust death.
In this second album under the name HA : ZE, Tomass Bekeris continues the journey begun in 2018 through his debut with that Passage that had so impressed the Old Scribe.
However, it is good to know that the artist in question has a long history in the field of heavy metal and then matured, like a sudden big bang, into a multiple and surprising dilation.
Here, in these mammoth nine tracks, we find ourselves in the watery vapour of moods in search of a moment's respite, with the urge to enter musical genres that are only used to brushing up against each other. This is how electronica, hip hop, post punk, post rock, ambient present themselves, with an often midi guitar contouring the sky of this tidal wave, incredibly slow, but dense, like a storm that plays at approaching almost by stealth. The space of the research is concentrated in the assimilation of distances, of the routes planned by places and people, to totally exclude the voice, as a spiritual act necessary not to stain these sound projections.
Tomass, in order to get to the core of a stuttering reality, slows down the apotheosis of rhythms, so diseductive, to inject into it sound textures that come to settle, seduce, gut the superfluous and recharge the soul with a new light.
It is definitely in that side of the world where hypnosis comes from impervious places, from the harshness of living against an unbending nature. And it is in that room, where nothing is minuscule, that the notes of this compositional ace find perfect symbiosis with the landscapes not far from his city: everything is conversion, contact, motion at a continuous place. The loops, the dynamics do nothing more than bring the intuition of the plot into a compulsory opening, with scorching arrangements but kept at bay with class and wisdom.
The variety, which includes sweetness and electric juices at the limit of endurance (for those who do not like even slightly heavy guitars), is at the service of a prodigious rigour: what wins is not rhythm, harmony and more (the task above all of the song form and Pop music), but rather the listening prior to those single moments here compressed, grouped and then disseminated in multiple variations, to make listening a dreamlike journey but within a careful cerebral activity. Electronics is never the skin, let alone the bones of this musical architecture, but the glue that, from low to high temperature, manages to keep connected situations that fill the sky of confusion the perfect place to feel the drama of these compositions.
And it is chaos. Industrial petals that scour. Disturbing unease. Melting terror. Splashes of light and advancing darkness.
The bass is the instrument that makes listening inhospitable to the faint-hearted as it rummages the underbelly, while the synthesisers summarise, with the guitars painting the sides of pain.
The horizon becomes the season of courage: whoever listens to Healer puts himself in the safe haven of these nervous pills in search of sweetness, as the inevitable soundtrack to inner breakdowns. Tomass Bekeris does not forget the metal effervescence of his past, but transfers it, smoothing out the harshness and impetus, to bring it all into an almost invisible progressive layer, to befriend the angels of the notes, who here, in this hypnotic contraption, often find moments of calm and serenity. But we are witnessing some splendid unforeseen, miraculous bitter perversions, which do extraordinary damage to the security that listening could create. This explains the thousands of tiny, sensual inserts that seduce and hybridise notes that seem to be the ‘main’ ones.
To achieve all this, the Latvian musician calls upon eight artists, each of them to render a wedge, a stone, a nerve that weighs itself down only to try to vibrate in the vulnerable space of the imagination. Not guests, but additional architects that thicken the initial project. We find ourselves, then, in front of minimal and then objective broadsides, with transistors sticking to the sound, the true king of this incredible project: not in his image, let alone likeness, but a fugitive, a cross-country athlete fleeing from those lands to find other dimensions.
A primitive impulse governs the appearance and the electronic set-up: keyboards and effects ranging in seconds, while seeking the redundancy of delay to generate dust and amniotic liquids, with the result of witnessing a birth that is nine tracks long, not nine months
Bitterness, indiscipline, honesty and its opposite shine unhappily in these guitars that sum up what early dream pop did. But it could not remain pure. The secret of the beauty and, above all, of the richness of this sonic effluvium is precisely to be found in the willingness to shuffle the cards, the musical decades, to specify the need for even forced but sensible embraces, to make the whole become a prefabricated structure whose interior one can inhabit with less fear...
One cannot but turn out to be travellers, perplexed and unsatisfied perhaps for many, but at least the Old Scribe is absolutely convinced that what has been explored is a geographical, historical mystery, full of dust, of diadems, of strategies, of naivety in search of adoption, to end up, exhausted, in an infinite cuddle, full of bruises...
Album of the year 2025
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
19th March 2025
