Healindelay is a compilation of demo tracks created by Portuguese artist Jesse Moitas in a time span between 2011 to 2014 and 2022. Inspired by 80's atmospheric delay effects, a nostalgia of a time that was never lived. A feeling.
Analog photography by the artist.
Sacred Sea 2024
To support the artist, buy the album HERE
How did your environment inspire you when you recorded these songs?
It probably wouldn’t have happened if I wasn't in a village. There is nothing happening there. You have to take a car to go to the city. I was spending a lot of time on my own. And the nature, the environment was very inspiring to create my own little world. It helped me not to distract myself.
Then at the age of 21 you moved to London, there was a dream to make this music and follow this dream.
There’s a level of making it happen, following the footsteps of the people you listen to. I didn’t realize that what I was doing in my village was enough.
That’s what I like about this compilation that we put together, that it’s good enough in its own sense.
Yes it’s not about the destination in that sense. It’s the effort put in and the joy of making it. The idea that it would be out some time would also bring a lot of joy, it was like a symbiotic way of doing and dreaming what it could become.
How do you relate emotionally to these songs when you think about how you lived in London and those creations you had made before?
It’s like the death of a dream. Some tracks I did later in London and much more recently in Berlin. But most of the tracks I made in 2011-2012. Most of them are recorded on a phone. When I moved to London I didn’t have the space to create in that way. I joined a band called Sunnbrella which helped keep some of my creativity. But I was always drained trying to pay my rent and studying in university.
It’s a little bit like life archeology, these songs from another lifetime and your delayed healing.
I acted in fear most of the time. If I would have been in a more peaceful mind I would have maybe developed this further. But it feels like sometimes you just don’t know better. And then later you find an opportunity to come to peace and accept what happened as it is. In the end there is healing involved and some people would say that’s just life.
You’ve mentioned visiting Pompei, can you tell me about that and how you relate to that place?
It just makes you realize you don’t have to make a big deal out of things that you’re taking too seriously, like not having released music for example. You’re there seeing the destroyed city and you see yourself and your frustrations or that I could have done so much more during this time, that I feel lost, filled with resentment and a feeling of failure. It reminds you that this is all really really silly. You just create your problems for no reason. Life is passing by in front of you, you’re just caught up in these ideas and then it has an impact seeing a place like that. It’s full of life one day and in one night it’s all gone. You go back to your routines and mental habits and it takes some time for this realization to kick in.
When you come back to yourself now with this delayed healing actually happening it’s like in a way that sense of cultivating your peace. By releasing things of the past.
Yes because I'm making a big deal out of it. By judging myself, like it was not good enough, it’s like now I have to take my responsibility to be with it and that it’s ok. It helps me gain a new perspective, that was always there but I couldn’t see it. A sense of joy, that this is about fun as well. This is about enjoying and having fun. It’s not just doing it. Now it’s about letting it happen, instead of just doing. You can swim into a wave that is coming on the shore, you can swim into it. Doesn’t mean the wave will drag me back. You can swim with it. Sometimes you just gotta jump, it’s a bit confusing, it’s a bit of a blind jumping.
It’s like a return to realization that at the end of the day it never stopped, you just do what you do, it’s part of you.
Yes it’s like the shoemaker, that’s all he does, he just makes shoes and he enjoys, he enjoys going back to his shoes. It’s just a thing that you do, you don’t have to be it. It’s just a way of expressing creativity. It just happens to be a guitar for me. For this guy it’s a shoe.
About the artist:
Jesse Moitas is a musician from Portugal with the guitar as his main tool of expression. With influences ranging from primitive folk to shoegaze and alternative rock in its wide spectrum.
He spent most of his twenties living in London partaking in various bands and projects while exploring his own sound in an introverted and almost secretive way. Now living in Berlin he is sharing his early works and some more recent creations as a sound collage of different lifespans.
Jesse’s music feels like going back to an ocean we’ve missed for so long but that has only ever existed in our dreams.