Heith – The Liars Tell… (PAN 143)

Heith’s debut album X,wheel marked the beginning of a long journey, the start to a tortuous exploration of consciousness and spirit. The Liars Tell…, on the other hand, feels like a kind of respite, a moment of meditation and pause from the fatigue of dimension-hopping. As if the traveller dismounted their carriage and, standing puzzled on a crossroad, listened to the echoes of distant places. Occupying a liminal space and letting thousand of contradictory tales form the lyrics to one unfathomable song.

This EP’s emphasis on the singing voice is itself not casual, but the focal point of a research on language and words, from their uncanny worlding power to their ultimate failure to deliver universally accessible truths. The human voice is treated as the most fragile of instruments, a spectral presence aided into matter by technology. The tonally ambiguous beauty in Heith’s processed singing stands to imitate the immanent wisdom of sacral inspiration while simultaneously belonging to a sketchy trickster. A divine liar is whispering into the ears of the somnambulist, instigating dangerous temptations of knowledge.

The delicate shanty at the core of “<>e” conducts slowly from a shiny synth desert to a cascade of arpeggiated instruments to, finally, a contained eruption of percussion and noise, all while never losing its hypnotic sense of caution. INVERTED VERTIGO’s slow rising chords, prolonged whispers and lamenting flutes feel like a soul trembling to detach from a state of static plenitude, fevering to plunge into the abstract tumult of it conclusion. Similarly, the minimal, stretchy melody of “medicine boy/3cate” gives the vocals the space to alternatively fragment and multiply, only to then coalesce again into one choral force, ultimately giving space to a discharge of broken guitar strings. Closer “The Circus Lodge (Orchestroll Version)” is a mirrored reversion and an addendum to X, Wheel ’s “A Venus Flytrap In The Circus Lodge”, initially riding on the back of a reverb- drenched crescendo to a melancholic slow burn of electronic reeds.

This all makes The Liars Tell…a crucial point into Heith’s evolution, influenced by two years of increasingly ambitious live performances and by the relentless wanderings of an uncompromisingly creative mind.