Alyosha Het

'His new record, The Purgatourist, displays an incredible aptitude for eerie, moody lo-fi/bedroom production, doing so without sacrificingsongcraft. His vocals drenched in drinks, smokes and raspy spirit, the man behind this oddball gem is an excellent composer of gutter friendly,left field folk.’ – Whatzup

Many songwriters dream about retreating from the world to work on their art uninterrupted. When Alyosha Het cloistered himself in a basement with his guitar and a four track, the situation was quite different than the romantic getaways of others’ dreams. “All songs on the album were recorded by a quite lonesome me in a quite lonesome basement,” Het says in comment on The Purgatourist, his new album, and its cryptic lyrics and deliberately hollow arrangements.
On The Puragourist, the elements of isolation seem to conspire against the songwriter. It reconstructs the claustrophobic atmosphere in its use of degrading tape, vocals passed through a broken guitar amp, and a twisted take on 60s production techniques. Amid such sounds and with lyrics about death and the occult, that the album opener (“Little Green Pills – Little Green Men”) name-checks paranoid British producer Joe Meek seems natural. Like Meek, Het had to push the boundaries of what his equipment could do. To create those sounds, Het found it important to avoid the use of computers, drum machines, and other now standard accessories of the home recording musician. This included a commitment to avoid a standard drumset and drumming techniques.

According to Het, the obsessive quality is evident all the way down to the barely audible elements: “Many of the songs contain hidden messages basically as a way of entertaining myself while recording. Most of which I’ve forgotten, though I do recall that my real name appears several times.” Aside from the black humor (and the raw emotions they barely mask), those hidden messages may be the closest one can get to the real Alyosha Het, who seems to prefer keeping the world at a distance. When asked for biographical details, he only replies that he seldom eats or sleeps. “If music doesn’t pan out,” he adds as an afterthought, “I plan to move to Romainia and hunt vampires.”