Heith’s wyrd debut merges occult practices and ritualistic raving

The cover of Heith’s debut album X, Wheel features a digital manuscript covered in glyphs and sigils. Inspired by the automatic drawings of occultist Austin Spare, the Milan-based artist teamed up with his friend and collaborator Pietro Agostoni to create an asemic alphabet made entirely of unknown letters and ideograms. “It’s made in a way that’s impossible to translate,” he says. “You write it and it’s impossible to read back what you wrote.” This process of automation can enable individuals to record subconscious expressions in the mind, like dreaming. “The idea was to somehow break the semiotic barrier and find ways to detach from the meaning.” 

There’s a hypnagogic quality to X, Wheel that is untethered to linear notions of time and space. Combining artistic and occult practices, the 11-track album transports listeners into a digital otherworld where strange and unfamiliar sounds are rendered in odd frequencies that feel familiar yet alien, situated in both the faraway future and a distant past. The titular wheel spins track-by-track from arcane folk to wyrd metal to chamber electronics and there’s a sense of something buried deep that precedes the singular self, perhaps a collective consciousness. “For me, it’s more about the alchemy of the process than the sound itself,” says Heith, “to see the death of a sound and what comes after it”.

The relationship between technology and spiritualism is at the heart of Heith’s artistic practice. “I find it very interesting to somehow hack technology to bring out something which is more spiritual,” he says. “Every ritual in ancient times used technology.” He points to the role of fire in the earliest hermetic practices. “It’s part of the process of development of technology and rituals, like how symbols change their meaning and new symbols come up in every age.” Focusing on the cosmogonic potential of sound, there’s a ritualistic quality to the album that transcends the world of symbols – notes and frequencies – towards a digi-mystic realm that essayist and technopagan thinker Erik Davis refers to as the bridges “between logic and fantasy, math and myth, the inner and outer worlds”.

One of the co-founders behind Milan-based art squat Macao, Heith’s philosophy extends to include the ritualistic qualities of rave. “The main influence was rave music but more generally the attitude of the rave,” he agrees. In his seminal 1995 essay ‘Technopagans: May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace’, Davis links electronic music to a form of neo-tribal ritual, applying the "imaginative interfaces” of Pagan mysticism to the era's latent digital world. “I really believe that raves are some kind of ritual. And I feel these two words are really connected. So, for me, it was really natural to mix all these things together.”

This ritualistic quality can particularly be felt during his live shows. At this year’s Unsound, Heith premiered his new A/V show featuring percussionist Jacopo Battaglia of Zu, multi-instrumentalist Leonardo Rubboli and design studio Declino. Plunging the audience into pitch darkness, abstract visuals of elemental plains and mythologies cast shadows over Heith and his collaborators, reeling listeners into his otherworldly soundscape. Like the album’s mysterious language scroll, it acts as a conduit for subconscious manifestations and cybernetic divination.

X, Wheel is out now. Take a look at some exclusive images of Heith from this year’s Unsound festival in the gallery above