[Reviewed by: Iaha Crax]
On this album, Hati consists of three interpreters playing on several traditional instruments connected to ethnic music, such as didgeridoos, rain and clap stick, double windwand and pvc pipe gongs, cymbals, bells, spring drums, shell, flute and horns, ocarina, bass drum, rattles. What they get out of this warm combination is a fluid and mostly percussion-based sound that celebrates ritual dances and cadences. Bearing a deep anthropological value, their music stands for a transcultural modern symbiosis of rhythms and sounds once imbued with a sacral value. The tribal fever on the first extract, “Cascades”, is akin to the trance-dictated improvisation following an atavist internal pattern reminiscent of Australian ancient civilizations.
“Metanous” features an intense use of the didgeridoo, the wind instrument of Australian Aboriginals, a drone pipe with a deep-bass grave sound. The piece “Thalu” explores the apparently few possibilities of this instrument, when it is taken out of its ceremonial context. Hati members create a new background for such atypical instruments, which are in this manner more likely to appeal to the occidental ear. It is in fact a “Passage”, the title for the third song, from past times into the present age, a passage that is being sublimated by the suggestion of music.
The recovery of ancient ways of expression is being made with a most poetical intention, that of reconnecting the soul with its origin. “Alpha Et Omega”, this piece of mild ecstatic tones, is but a wandering and an inquiry upon the inner dynamic of the soul, a musical tale of breathing in and out life itself.
Hati comes from Toruń in Poland and have established a very special place for themselves in the industrial scene. In their music they combine the sound of hand-crafted instruments with objects of domestic utility. At best, one can observe how exotic this intersection is when attending to their live performances. While the merging of found objects into an artistic space is very common to the industrial genre, Hati undoubtedly possess an authentic perspective on how these objects may be re-contextualized within a dramatic musical performance. They work it out in a sort of “Fusion”, as the fifth song is entitled, a fusion that concretely merges musical instruments with disposed objects (such as barrels) and forms a completely new aural emission. Here one hears the didgeridoo, wind instruments blowing, sheet gongs and metal scratching, all of them corroborating to give birth to a paradoxical multicultural and multi-temporal musical ritual. The matter of every object, whether is a musical object or not, is fusing into a virginal sound so fitting to our present age of symbiosis.
On this lovely disc, Hati’s ethnologists have taken a significant inclination towards the aboriginal music of Australia, like this fanciful “Wangga” which, instead of paying a visit to the indigenous lands of Australia, the listener can fully appreciate in their player. The song is mainly following the rhythm of the didgeridoo accompanied by the beating of a stick and a colorful flute, and is inspired by dead spirits.
“Metanous” ends in a note of postmodernism with the piece “Purga”. As sound has an undeniably healing power, the gongs, cymbals and perhaps bells on “Purga” are sounded consecutively in a spiral movement, acting as a whip or a broom and wiping away moral and psychical dirt.
Hati – Metanous
Zoharum, ZOHAR 105-2
CD/Digital 2015
Santa Sangre 