Heith

You close your eyes in a darkened room. The screen on your phone emits a soft, glowing outline through your eyelids. On a loop, a video titled Ethereal Beach Ambience – 8 Hours swells evolving synth lines through your headphones, layered with the faintest whispers of reversed speech. You’ve repeated the affirmations scribbled in your Notes app – ‘I am shifting. I am safe. I am not confined to this reality’ – so many times before. You’ve counted down from one hundred twice already and doubt is edging in. But at some intangible point, the air in the room changes and your limbs feel impossibly light. Your breathing slows, your pulse steadies, and a new, perfect reality comes into view; one filled with impossibly white sand and turquoise ocean throbs that capture the sun’s rays and refract them in spirals. 

Introducing reality shifting: a phenomenon, if you weren’t already aware, that has ballooned in popularity over recent years. Stories like this began spreading in hidden corners of Reddit, spilled outward through TikTok hashtags, and multiplied into a full-fledged subculture, particularly during the isolation of the pandemic lockdowns. Users describe travelling to parallel worlds, or ‘desired realities’ (DRs) created through careful scripting and hypnotic routines. Some choose Hogwarts or anime universes; others, placeless, idyllic voids of calm, but both as rituals for a kind of escapism.

For Dan Guerrini, who records music as Heith, these virtual migrations were fascinating precisely because they echoed older patterns: communal rituals, collective hallucinations, and centuries-old folklore. That curiosity crystallises on his new album, Escape Lounge (released via PAN), an uncanny, soft-lit release that folds together a trip-hop bounce, shimmering folk-pop motifs, and whispered transmission from a waiting room outside time. In other words, the same browser-born folk magic that fills online forums has seeped into his own sonic world-building as Heith.

Dan’s attraction to the uncanny started early. As a child he experienced brief, floating detachments from his own body. “Dissociation sometimes during childhood happens after very intense troubles,” he explains. “It happened to me a few times, and that’s probably why I got a bit obsessed with it later on.” 

Initially, as a late-teen, he rebuked these ideas, leaning more into the more material aspects of our world. Over time, however, something nagged at the edges of his certainty; a sense that reality might be porous and leaky, and that not everything must fit to an evidenced framework. He posits that one of those break-through moments occurred just a few years ago, during a period of meditation. “I suddenly thought, this feels exactly like something from my childhood,” he recalls of one session. “There was a strange familiarity to it, but also a deep sense of calm and serenity because of that.”

Lockdown then shoved the whole question onto his screen. What caught his attention was how these spiritual practices have evolved to now being mediated through different technologies: “It was very interesting, and kind of fun, to investigate how this practice of reality shifting – a very old practice you can read in esoteric books for getting in touch with ancestral energy, ancestors themselves or other spirits – was just online, on Reddit,” he tells me. “People are sharing advice, there’s detailed instructions. The instructions are written by some twelve-year-old kid, not necessarily on an intellectual level, but for getting into dream worlds like the latest Diablo game or Prince of Persia.”

Watching thousands gather in Reddit threads, yet rarely in the same room, made Heith think about how this reflects on the world at large. “A lot of the communities I’m talking about are basically exclusively online: most of these people have never met each other in real life or ever will,” he says. “There are fewer and fewer spaces where you can share the little things in everyday life.”

Reflecting on this rise of shifting and other online ritual practices, he adds: “Perhaps it’s an interesting metaphor for what community means nowadays. People are meeting online, but the real meeting they are having through these rituals is also out of body.” In other words, communion becomes something inward and individualised, mediated by screens, imagined through rituals, and experienced in solitude. It’s a vision of community shaped by the lonely architectures of the internet and the self, rather than any physical gathering as pre-internet life once insisted upon.

A recent book on Loneliness in Europe reflects these ideas empirically and at scale, finding that one in five Europeans (20.8%) feel lonely “often” or “always”, a marked rise since the early 2000s, when only around 10% said the same. Meanwhile, almost a third of EU citizens say they “rarely or never” meet friends in person, with a huge 40% of respondents saying they have no one nearby to rely on in an emergency. “It can be really hard to find your community today,” Heith notes.

Against this backdrop, online rituals feel less like fringe curiosities and more akin to a digital commons, providing the basic human needs of presence, togetherness, and shared meaning that we all crave to some degree. And in the realm of music, it’s no secret that clubbing, an emphatically embodied and communal, often spiritual, type of gathering, is in decline among Gen-Z, just as these alternative spiritualities flourish.

What once happened on sweat-soaked dance floors, as well as more run-of-the-mill arenas for gathering, like local community centres or social workers clubs, often called ‘third spaces’, is now increasingly likely to unfold as interactions online, whether as a live streamed album launch as Lyra Pramuk recently invited her fans to attend, or at Minecraft-based concerts. The desire for ritual, Heith suggests, hasn’t disappeared in that sense; it’s just dispersed, re-platformed, and recalibrated for a different kind of society and person in the 21st century, for good or for bad.

But if today’s reality-shifting teens feel novel on the face of things, Heith sees them as the latest link in a much longer chain. “Victorian London was full of housewives holding séances with photocopied grimoires,” he explains, name-checking outsider artist/occultist Austin Osman Spare as a formative obsession. What fascinated him was not the secret-society pomp of the Golden Dawn, but how ordinary people began remixing esoteric scraps for personal use outside of them. A sort of DIY spirituality uncannily similar to Reddit tutorials by random users.

At the same time, today these same online spaces that incubate sincere, DIY rituals also grease the wheels of a booming wellness industry. “Most spiritual practices are marketed, there’s a lot of self-improvement and meditation out there, and there’s some irony in that,” he says with a half-laugh. I mention how TikTok’s algorithm can shuttle a young viewer from somewhat humorous 5am ice bowl soaking sessions to fringe health gurus in three swipes; Heith nods. “You start with one practice and the algorithm keeps feeding you five other gurus, even without understanding [where it came from]. And it works, it gets people attached, because the body and mind often feel something impactful when you try them.” 

What used to demand esoteric reading lists or secret societies with charismatic leaders now arrives as swipeable content, stripped of context and monetised through affiliate links and retreat packages. For Heith, these fast-moving, “lighter” cults reveal how folklore adapts to our attention (and gets sucked into capitalism’s orbit), while adding another layer of intrigue to the broader subject he’d been quietly observing for years.

Escape Lounge inhabits these modern folkloric practices and all the uneasy intersections within them. “It was a kind of observer’s diary, as well as an archive,” he says. “A personal document of what was happening in my life, to materialise my reality somehow, as a way for myself to not escape reality, but confront it.” Escape Lounge is the follow up to his debut full-length album, X, wheel (2022), a record rooted in mythic archetypes and symbolism. But with Escape Lounge, the mythology is founded in his own experiences.

It’s a reality that was defined by near-constant movement. While touring X, wheel, Heith passed through cities including Stockholm, Milan, Berlin, New York, and London, but had that familiar feeling of drifting between ‘placeless’ zones like hotel rooms and airport lounges. The title Escape Lounge nods to this – named after a real lounge in Stansted Airport, where escape can be yours for only £39.99 per person – but also subverts it. “I was touring a lot and, especially in the past, music was some kind of way of escaping reality for me,” he explains. “But that’s not what I do anymore. I realised that I am actually in these places. I’m really there and I should materialise that in some way.”

Performance became part of that materialisation, as a way to anchor himself in these places, and acknowledge himself as an active part of them. “All the travelling made me feel like I was nowhere, but I came to realise that I’m actually delivering an experience,” he continues. “For myself, the crowd, the audience. It was definitely not an escape for me, and so it was interesting to me to create this parallel between an imaginary place and a real, embodied one, and treat the performance space like a kind of dream reality.”

Long before these latest album launched as Heith, Dan was wiring up speakers inside Milan’s occupied, self-managed arts squat Macao. “Macao was the last time I felt a real community that was based on sharing, not just ideas, but collective experiences,” he recalls of their psychedelic dance floors, improvised noise shows, and marathon discussion circles. 

It’s a far cry from the increasingly corporate-run music industry topical today, with many festivals – including Sónar, Field Day and DGTL – now owned by conglomerates like Superstruct. Superstruct, in turn, is owned by private equity giant KKR, whose investments have drawn intense criticism for ties to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Heith was due to play at the 2025 edition of Sónar this month, as part of a new live show with James K, Günseli Yalcinkaya, and Andrea Belosi (recently debuted at Nuits Sonores under the name The Talk), but ultimately chose to withdraw. “If the situation remains as it is, we’re going to cancel the show 100%,” he said ahead of a scheduled call with the festival team. “I think it’s important. There is a different kind of power in collective solidarity, and the campaign has already raised a lot of awareness and attention.”

That same belief in collective effort carried into the making of Escape Lounge: label-mates lent studios, while friends like saxophonist Aase Nielsen and flautist Leonardo Rubboli recorded their parts live at a Berlin gig, with the raw multitrack bleed left intact on the album. “I was tired of making music alone,” Heith says. “I know these people’s energies; I just set the frame and let them be themselves.” It was through this nomadic rhythm that the record slowly took shape, influenced by each place, but ultimately coming together in London. “I love London,” he beams. “I spent the last year there, as I made final edits across different studios.”

Living near Old Kent Road in Bermondsey while finishing the record, Dan says he often walked through Burgess Park to clear his head. The long, sloping green often hums with overlapping sounds, sights, and rhythms from different communities: in one corner, the local Latin-American crowd wheels out PA stacks and charcoal grills for weekend asado; at another, school kids tear across the BMX track; while runners, anglers, and dog-walkers weave along the lake’s edge. “In the morning it was always so serene and peaceful… but as the day continued, it became a completely different situation,” he says. That flip between calm and chaotic became a miniature of the album’s own doubleness: imaginary versus real, drifting versus grounded. It slips into tracks like You in Reverse, the song he now calls the record’s glue: pieced together in London, its lyrics name-check Old Kent Road and bottle that same dawn-to-dusk tension he felt on those walks. “I kind of enjoyed this double phase of the park.”

That doubleness filters through the album’s sonic textures too, from percussion that suggests rhythm without insisting on it, to vocals that flicker between incantation and fragment. “I haven’t published the lyrics,” Heith explains. “There’s not a message. The message is what you get out of it — that’s your message, the one you create.” Sometimes the voice isn’t even a coherent self. “Especially when it came to my own vocals, the idea was just to create a vocal of someone else, a person that doesn't exist,” he adds. “So it’s kind of a consequence that the lyrics are not really clear.” 

That shapeshifting also applies to featured collaborators. On A Pair of Dice, an eerie and slow-building, heavily palm-muted and plucked track featuring Price, the vocals start clean before gradually distorting into something higher pitched, crackling, and uncanny. “It becomes more and more alien, almost like another person,” Heith says. In this sense, the record becomes a sonic parallel to scripting your DR: a framework for projection, where even a voice can dissolve into something imagined, flickering between presence and abstraction.

For all the wandering and techno-mysticism that threads through Escape Lounge, you might consider Dan’s own day-to-day ritualistic anchors as disarmingly ordinary. Mornings begin with feeding his cat, followed by moments of quiet intention: choosing food carefully, brewing coffee, exercising. “They’re tiny gestures that probably sound stupid to dwell on,” he says. “But each choice changes the energy.” These acts of attention have become a kind of grounding practice. “More than anything, I’m learning to do less,” he adds. “I want to minimise my life, remove things, and do things mindfully.”

They’re humble touch-points that mirror the album’s ultimate grounding: that transcendence isn’t necessarily found in an unblemished dreamscape beyond this world, but in noticing the textured, imperfect rhythms of everyday life, the small rituals we build into them and the people we choose to share them with.