heka

“a mesmerizing calm and an emotional frankness that stares you in the face and wrestles with the aftermath of pain.” PASTE

“one lush composite sketch akin to the gothic folk stylings of Jenny Hval, Chelsea Wolfe, and Aldous Harding” Consequence

“A haunting indie folk lullaby reckoning with unrequited love, heka’s “(a) dab” is a stirring display of heartache dressed in wondrous ethereal and atmospheric beauty.” Atwood

“The result is one of intoxicating beauty, a short but mesmerizing project that’s tied to the promise of bigger things to come.” Our Culture

Having carved a name for herself in the underground indie scene over the last few years, multi-disciplinary artist, songwriter and producer heka releases new EP ‘swan songs’, OUT NOW via Practise Music.

Heka’s new EP, ‘swan songs’ is a collection of songs about the end of love. The lead track from the EP ‘i don’t move, i’ is a song about the indifference to other people’s pain. heka explains that “It was inspired by a particularly dramatic night I experienced years ago, but when I started to write about it, it morphed into something else: a reflection on the universality of a certain type of detachment that is as human as compassion, a refusal to be moved and therefore move towards others. I wanted it to read as an admission of guilt as well as an accusation of a kind of behaviour that I don’t think anyone is completely innocent of.”

Elsewhere, ‘swan songs’ opens with ‘where the non existent’ a rhythmic soundscape built through the layering of organic and electronic textures: hypnotic clicking, breathing, scratching sounds fill the space like the murmurings of wild mysterious creatures.

Suddenly, the world is quiet. An electric guitar strums its first melancholy chords and ‘i’m the thorn’ begins, the first verse referencing the title of the EP itself:

“I wait for your song, your swan song”

‘monkey’ represents a transition at the heart of the EP: it grows tentatively, through the layering of organic samples, into a steady lo-fi beat with licks of dark electric guitar weaving in and around it like weeds.

On ‘april (away)’, languid chords and longing hums drip with the melancholy of endings rather than beginnings, yet the sparse but lively percussive elements of its eclectic beat imbue the track with tension and urgency.

Following current single ‘i don’t move, i’, the EP closes with the instrumental ‘coda’, an improvised piece recorded with her sister.

Nomadic, the transience of heka’s personal explorations translates for all to see within her music. Fusing classic with contemporary, the harsh intimacy of her self proclaimed butchered folk draws sound and song from the environments she finds herself within, and sees her drift through multiple perspectives and realities with each track.

Deeply intimate and awash with melancholia, her style of lo-fi warmth incorporates snippets of conversations previously buried deep within the notes of her phone, blending murmurings of life with themes of love and loss, nostalgia and the everyday.