JHelix was drawn to songwriting from an early age, enamoured by the allure of grunge, metal, and industrial music, while developing a lifelong reverence for the likes of Alice In Chains, Nine Inch Nails, and Type O Negative. He was later swept up in the electronic music wave, enabling his love for heavy, atmospheric sounds, to fuse with his new passion for recording and production. Speaking of this experience, JHelix says, “The freedom of creation that synths, drum machines, and computers gave me, along with the dark tapestries of sound a single individual could weave, was intoxicating”.
While his music remained for years largely centred in the studio, he’s setting out this year on his most ambitious project yet: one which has taken more than a year to perfect, and which will see him return to the stage with a band that is more than capable of delivering the music exactly as he always wanted it to be.
JHelix’s latest release, ‘Upon The Earth’, likens logging onto the internet as like accepting an invitation to enter a dark wood. We are beckoned down a long, often foreboding, path, from social media platforms and underground communities alike. We explore liminal spaces that provide coverage for self-appointed moral authorities, each of whom is convinced of their own virtue, and their unshakeable correctness.
With ‘Upon The Earth’, he makes the case for returning to the grit and weight of a pre-internet age, and all the raw power that came with it. Showcasing his talent as a metal guitarist, JHelix piles formidable riff upon formidable riff, encased in layers of transcendent refrains. While it all could be interpreted as political commentary – lines such as “We fight amongst ourselves / we can’t relate to one another’s hearts anymore” would seem to suggest this – the artist insists that it is rather an observation of an unsettled soul, who has become disheartened by how disconnected the human family now is (so yes, political commentary).
The vision of the song is brought to life with the help of JHelix’s high school acquaintance and now friend, Mike Sal, while the footage is refined by editor David of DavideoPro.
Much as in life, the lines between the real world and the digital are blurred, and in the clip we see that JHelix is not just standing ‘Upon The Earth’, but he’s also becoming at one with it; the lush green forests and being absorbed in turn by the green forestscapes and the Matrix-like pixels, with masked bots taking shots at him, seemingly at random.
It’s a wake-up call to those of us who spend most of our lives online, and that we should just go into nature for a bit – touch grass as it were. The digital world will still be right where we left it.
You can find out more about JHelix and his music online on his official website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Watch the video for ‘Upon The Earth’ below – and then go outside.
