Clear your agenda, turn off your phone, make yourself comfortable, open your mind. Ladies and gentlemen we are in the presence of an absolute masterpiece, a rare example of art in its purest and most powerful form. If you love music, then Headspace will be your new obsession.
I don’t know if he’s aware of it, but Hudson Lee has made the world a better place to live in with this album.
As result of years of work (yes, years), the 16-track project is presented to the public as “a collection of short stories”, a compilation of “the most intense emotional experiences I’d had throughout my life while writing it,” as he describes it. Indeed, like a story it’s exactly how it should be enjoyed. Hudson himself literally encourages “anyone who listens not to skip through. The whole album is continuous with key changes, transitions between tracks, and re-contextualized motifs and sounds.”
But wait, if you’re already thinking about a monolithic concept album, homogeneous form start to finish you’re going in the wrong direction. Headspace is, to say the least, kaleidoscopic. Almost unrecognizable in some moments if it weren’t for Lee’s peculiar style that’s always perceptible regardless of the genre or guise of the track. It’s like diving into a James Joyce’s novel with his stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose. If read occasionally, ‘Dubliners’ and ‘Ulysses’ may please or intrigue as well, but they become sensational pieces only if taken from the very beginning to the end. Only by having a global vision of these works, all the shades, the various voices, the points of view, the characters we meet during the reading, will all fit together, making the great artistic machine behind it work. In the same way, although Headspace contains extraordinary singles able to shine with their own light (‘Labyrinth’, ‘Stay’, ‘Way of Thought’ are my favourites), only when they’re framed together to complete the puzzle do they become a memorable and timeless piece of art.
What the album explores are traditional human experiences (on SoundCloud you can find a little description under each track), but thanks to the exquisite and clever sound design, the stories are expressed in a very unique way that I’ve never encountered before. Every emotion is portrayed extremely sharply, clearly. It’s like the artist presents himself without any filters or barriers, completely naked. And, as often, nudity tests, strikes deeply, make people definitely feel something, freedom or maybe distress.
Headspace is not a complex album outright. It can be, if you want to embrace it in its entirety, but, as mentioned above, it can serve the purpose of a lighter and purely aesthetic listen. The only thing that is forbidden, in my opinion, is to remain passive or apathetic in its presence. Let Headspace tease and drag you in its reality. Accept the challenge to properly listen to this album and never stop going down the rabbit hole, who knows what you might find.
Waiting for a physical release, stream Headspace in all its glory below or buy it digitally here
