Path of Life

Hey Hey, Thomas (Hatikwa) here.

Time really does fly. Eight years have passed since I released a full-length album. A lot has happened in my life since 2017. The pandemic, for example, affected everyone in the music industry and disrupted all future plans. After that unfamiliar period, a new, hungry, and highly diverse psytrance scene emerged. Not every promoter and artist was able to handle this change. I had major concerns too, and at times even real fear. I reached a point where I had to learn new production techniques to remain competitive. That pushed my stress level up, and the time during and after the pandemic was not an easy one for me musically. Even so, some tracks were created during that period that sat well outside my comfort zone.

At the same time, I made the fortunate decision to open my own label, Xonica Records, to new and still unknown but highly creative artists who needed a foundation for their art. Many of these artists also appear on the new album. At times, the input from these younger artists was so significant that it directly influenced my own production.

I was also deeply shaped by the birth of my child at the beginning of 2021 and by the responsibility of becoming a good father. I honestly did not produce a single note of music during the whole of 2021, because being a father simply mattered more at that moment. It was an incredibly emotional period, and it still is. As a small family, we are now following the same path. Where it will lead us, we do not know yet. We only know that we want to face it together. I tried, no, we did, to capture those emotions in the cover artwork of Path of Life.

Time moves on relentlessly. What has not changed since 2017, however, is that I have continued to evolve my music. Path of Life is technically an album, yes, but I see it more as a compilation of my different creative phases. Not a single track on Path of Life was written for an album. In fact, the album itself was never planned. Earlier this year, while cleaning up my hard drives, I realized that the past eight years left both positive and negative marks on my music. In short, Path of Life reveals the musical process of that period, shaped by the constant change of my own standards and by outside influences.

After a lot of thought, I decided not to rework the tracks to make them feel more polished or more balanced as an album. Every track on Path of Life represents a phase of my life across the last eight years. Sometimes life was beautiful and balanced, sometimes stressful and loud, sometimes melancholic and quiet. You will hear all of those qualities on Path of Life.

Many thanks to everyone who has accompanied me in different ways up to this point.

Thomas