Heith - A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge

On X, wheel, the new album from artist and Haunter Records founder Heith, the very texture of human consciousness is rendered as both malleable and nebulous, something that shifts and warps as a result of the artist’s continued exploration of esoteric notions of reality. His first album for PAN manifests a practice that draws on both the spiritual and the artistic, folding in elements of psychedelia, psytrance, freak folk, stoner metal, harsh noise and early electronic music into a singular sonic language, inspired in equal parts by biological forms of plant communication and the logic of dreams. This focus on alternative methods of communication extends out of phonetic expression and into speculative inscription with Angel’s Hair, an alphabet of vegetal glyphs and mycological characters devised by Heith in collaboration with the visual artist Pietro Agostoni. The alphabet shares its name with the folkloric substance siliceous cotton, a sticky gelatinous substance of unknown origin, claimed by believers and zealots to be produced during UFO visitations and miraculous manifestations of the Virgin Mary, respectively. This strange language provides one path into the world of X, wheel, and the nightmarish overgrown ecosystem of one of the album’s most unsettling tracks, ‘A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge.’ Following three bioluminescent figures moving around a shadowy dreamscape, ‘A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge’ embodies a world in which the natural world produces a violent, predatory response, a nod to the titular carnivorous plant. Probing the interplay between this lethal connotation, Venus as the Roman god of love and beauty and as one of the closest planets to earth, Heith conjures a world in which liminal realities are illuminated – the impossible proximity of the planet evoking an unknowable space, the love deity gesturing towards new modes of faith. The denizens of the world of ‘A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge’ emit an inner radiance, yet this light does not travel upwards, transcendent of physical flesh, but instead seems of the unkempt earth, glowing spores that suggest these figures have sprung up from the very soil and sand over which they now tread. Like the Angel’s Hair alphabet, these beings take on a physical form familiar yet unknowable to us, moulded in the shapes of bodies, yet smeared with a life-giving substance of a different nature, the natural world taking back control of its inhabitants with ghostly guardians, stalking their birthplace surging with all the promise of violence of the Venus Flytrap. A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge follows Your Element (a spell of equality) and Dero as the third part of a video trilogy accompanying X, wheel. In Your Element, ancient ritual practice and cursive script are illuminated by laser light, a contemporary excavation of spiritual tradition and myth. In Dero, strange scrolling visuals give us glimpses of dystopian urban environments, occult graffiti and carnival fun house imagery suggesting a transformed environment of illusion and deceit. In the third and final part, Heith reaches past the summoning ceremony and the disfiguring tricks, delving deeper into a darker, more natural space. The denizens of A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge move with unknowable potency, a mystery only amplified by the concluding strands of Angel’s Hair, a new visual language for new realm of existence. Experienced as a hazy cloud of shadow and loam, the dream reaches back into the waking world, casting weird shadows on the boundaries between flesh and earth. ‘A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge’ is taken from X, wheel, which is out now on PAN. For more information about Heith you can find him on Instagram and at Haunter Records. ‘A Venus Flytrap in the circus lodge’ Credits: Video – Heith & Nicola Tirabasso Camera – Nicola Tirabasso Assistant – Leone Ciocchetti Lettering – Pietro Agostoni 3D – DECLINO (@ & @gvn908) Actors – Alison Bizzi @ultracreature, Clara Grilanda, Thomas Venezia Make Up – Bruno Fontana