HENOSIS is Joep Beving’s closing chapter in a trilogy of albums – marking the end of an intensely personal four-year spiritual and philosophical exploration.
“This is my journey, and my search for understanding,” says Beving, the
acclaimed composer/pianist who rose to eminence in 2015 thanks to millions of streams of the contemplative, atmospheric ‘Solipsism’. By now he is one of the most streamed pianists in the world.
“I believe that the answers are much more on the inside,” he explains. “So this
journey, in a way, is also an internal one. My hope is to give people a space to be in for a couple of minutes or hours where they feel things just seem to be right, like a recognition that they’re understood or that they can just be.”
On HENOSIS the Dutch composer continues his minimalist and at times romantic
style of writing, but this time explores new territories. It sets off where his
sophomore album ‘Prehension’ left us, the warm intimate sound of the Schimmel piano Beving inherited from his grandmother. With the help of producer Gijs van Klooster and through collaborations with Cappella Amsterdam, Echo Collective and Maarten Vos, Joep Beving opens up new musical worlds using orchestral
and electronic sounds alongside the familiar piano.
His debut album ‘Solipsism’ investigates the self and how it is related to the
other by trying to show we have a red understanding of what it is to be human.
For ‘Prehension’ Beving describes realizing he had zoomed out from the
individual level to the level of the collective. HENOSIS is the last step, in which
Beving’s destination is the vastness of the cosmos – that great, black void – in
search of “ultimate reality and emptiness of the mind”.