i Häxa, taken from the Swedish term for “witch”, is a project comprised of vocalist Rebecca Need-Menear (Anavae) and producer/instrumentalist Peter Miles (highlights include producer for Architects and co-producer on Tesseract’s War of Being) and blends art rock, trip-hop, ambient, industrial, and dark folk influences together into one heady brew. Originally conceived as a single flowing suite, but released as four EPs, and now fused into a single album, there’s a few different ways to listen to the full i Häxa. Everything flows but there are recognisable song formations, distinct quarterings within that flow—at the same time, it makes little sense to listen to, for example, “The Well” without listening to “Fog of War” because the two are parts of a seamless whole.
Swollen layers of synths and pulsating backbeats, graceful piano and lamenting strings form the instrumental backbone of i Häxa with Need-Menear’s sinuous, high-toned voice—in timbre, a more powerful, just-going-through-a-phase sister to Magdalena Bay’s Mica Tenenbaum—sojourning from vulnerable (“Circle”) to threnodic (“The Well”) to boisterous (“Destroy Everything”). Around half the tracks feature spoken word recitations from Need-Menear—the dread monologue of “Fog of War”, the rhythmic poetry that drives “Inferno”, the venomous whispers on “Army”—and her deft ear for enunciation, her oratory range, and paganic lyricism keep the listener hanging on every word. Where spoken word in music all too often falls flat with ropey oration and lazy samples, for i Häxa it’s a vital and astonishingly successful texture.
I could wax lyrical about each track for a while, but suffice it to say that the flow and complexity of the arrangements is pleasing, playing with time signatures (I still can’t work out the beat on “Eight Eyes”), manipulated vocals (“Vessel”, “Sapling”), and reprises (“Circle” builds on a piano melody first explored in “Last at the Table” while repurposing lyrics first heard on “Sapling”). On a song-to-song basis, i Häxa consistently impress, but it’s the interweaving overall structure that sells it, the consistent quartering, the effortless flow, the reprisal of motifs—sometimes familiar, sometimes transformed—all coming together to form something holistic. Despite marrying analogue and digital, i Häxa ultimately feels strangely natural, as though this energy always existed somewhere and Need-Menear and Miles became conduits for its message. That might be a weird metaphor but it’s one of the highest compliments I can pay to music; something that feels less like it was created and more like it always existed in some form and has only just found articulation. From: https://theprogressivesubway.com/2024/10/28/review-i-haxa-i-haxa/
