Regression sounds like Haare dragging its own psychedelic body backward through a machine built to erase it. Ilkka Vekka’s project had already developed a recognizable language by 2016: guitar and electronics stretched into long, hallucinatory fields where harsh noise, drone, ritual music and damaged psychedelia bled into one another. This album does not abandon that language, but it subjects it to a harsher environment. The spaciousness remains, yet the air has become dirty. Drones are interrupted by electrical splinters, vocals lie buried beneath distortion, and every surface crackles as though the recording itself is decomposing while it plays.
The title can suggest retreat, relapse or a return to an earlier condition, but Regression does not sound nostalgic. It does not recreate Haare’s beginnings as a thick wall of fuzz inspired by Incapacitants and Hijokaidan. Instead, it strips away some of the cosmic breadth associated with Vekka’s more meditative recordings and replaces it with industrial confinement. The six pieces still drift, but they drift through poisoned rooms. What once might have opened toward an enormous psychedelic sky now presses against rusted walls, damaged wiring and unreliable machinery.
“Do What Thou Wilt” begins with a title carrying the weight of occult self-determination, but the music offers no clean declaration of freedom. Its slow electronic movement feels obstructed from the beginning. Low tones spread beneath a field of corrosion while sharper frequencies push forward and retreat. Distorted vocals appear within the mass, but they are too deeply submerged to function as ordinary speech. The voice becomes evidence of a person trapped inside the recording rather than a narrator standing above it.
This treatment of vocals is central to Regression. Vekka does not use language to explain the atmosphere or provide a sequence of commands. Words are fed into the same system as the guitar, feedback and electronics, losing their authority as they become texture. A human presence remains audible, but its meaning has been broken apart. The result is more disturbing than a clearly shouted slogan. The listener hears somebody attempting communication while the machinery continually swallows the message.
“Tuhoa Kaikki,” Finnish for “destroy everything,” pushes further into this damaged industrial vocabulary. The phrase might promise an eruption, yet Haare’s destruction is rarely instantaneous. Vekka works through gradual contamination. A sustained sound acquires grit, then distortion, then an unstable halo of feedback. Another layer enters and presses against it until neither source can be heard clearly. Destruction occurs as a process of making boundaries disappear. Guitar becomes electronic waste, voice becomes interference, and drone becomes the residue left after repeated overload.
The album’s lo-fi character is not a costume placed over otherwise clean compositions. Crackles, uneven levels and rough distortion determine how the pieces move. Sounds sometimes appear to tear at the recording medium, creating the impression that the album was assembled from damaged transmissions rather than performed in a stable studio. The technical imperfections become active participants. They interrupt smooth development, roughen sustained tones and prevent the music from settling into polished dark ambience.
That roughness separates Regression from records that use drone as an invitation to disappear peacefully inside sound. Haare offers immersion, but not safety. The longer tones produce concentration while feedback keeps cutting across them, creating a constant conflict between surrender and alarm. Just as the listener begins adjusting to one layer, another frequency enters at an uncomfortable angle. The album repeatedly establishes a hypnotic state and then contaminates it before hypnosis can become comfort.
Vekka has described Haare as psychedelic noise, a phrase that fits because his work treats psychedelia as an alteration of perception rather than a collection of familiar 1960s decorations. There are no cheerful backward guitars or colorful studio tricks here. Psychedelia emerges through blurred scale, unstable repetition and the inability to distinguish foreground from background. A small crackle can suddenly feel enormous. A distant drone can move close enough to become physically oppressive. The music changes the apparent dimensions of the room without ever announcing that the change has happened.
Regression’s industrial qualities are equally psychological. The pieces evoke machinery, metal, electrical systems and abandoned infrastructure, but they do not provide a cinematic tour of a factory. The machines are internal. Repetition behaves like compulsive thought, returning without solving anything. Distortion resembles memory subjected to pressure until details collapse. Feedback becomes a nervous signal that cannot be switched off. The industrial setting is less a location than a model of the mind caught inside recurring damage.
This gives the title another possible meaning. Psychological regression describes a movement toward an earlier stage when present conditions become impossible to manage. Haare’s album does not illustrate that concept literally, but its structure often feels caught between forward motion and involuntary return. Sounds drift, transform and accumulate, yet familiar pressures keep resurfacing. A voice enters only to be buried again. A thin signal escapes the lower mass before distortion pulls it back. Progress occurs, but every advance carries the shape of relapse.
The six-track format helps the album avoid becoming one long undifferentiated fog. Each piece opens a different section of the same contaminated environment. Some emphasize low mechanical drift, while others expose more piercing feedback, vocal damage or brittle surface noise. The changes are not dramatic enough to break the album’s atmosphere, but they alter the listener’s position within it. One track feels like standing beside a failing machine; another resembles hearing the same failure through concrete walls.
Haare began in 1999 from a desire to make pure harsh noise, using turntables, radio, metal junk, tape and a DOD fuzz pedal pushed deeply into overload. Vekka gradually expanded that setup to include guitar, E-bow, synthesizers, gongs, organ pipes, flutes and other acoustic materials. Regression is compelling because it does not display this expanded vocabulary as a collection of instruments. Everything has been forced through one diseased nervous system. Sources lose their names and become pressure, vibration and abrasion.
The guitar is particularly difficult to isolate. It rarely behaves as a conventional lead instrument, and there are no riffs placed cleanly at the front of the mix. Instead, it feeds sustained tones, harmonic smears and distorted currents into the larger construction. At times its physical origin can be sensed in the way a sound bends or blooms, but any recognizable string attack is quickly dissolved. The instrument functions as a generator of unstable matter rather than a vehicle for performance.
Freak Animal was an ideal home for the album. The Finnish label has long favored recordings where noise retains dirt, danger and physical resistance, and Regression refuses the polished spaciousness that could have made Haare’s drone elements easier to consume. The CD sounds deliberately crude, full of buried information and unpleasant frequency relationships. Its power comes not from technical perfection but from the conviction with which imperfection has been shaped.
Regression therefore marks neither a simple return nor a decline. It is Haare moving sideways into a narrower, more suffocating version of its own world. The project’s ritual and psychedelic instincts remain present, but enlightenment has been replaced by psychic excavation. Meditation becomes fixation. Expansion becomes enclosure. The inner journey does not lead toward clarity; it reaches a basement where damaged machines continue repeating thoughts that should have ended years ago.
By the final piece, the album has not resolved its pressure so much as taught the listener how to inhabit it. The crackles no longer register as flaws, the distorted voices no longer demand translation, and the drifting industrial waste begins to feel almost organic. Regression succeeds because it makes decay sound active. Nothing here is peacefully disappearing. Every broken signal continues working, every buried voice continues pushing upward, and every layer of distortion preserves the violence that damaged it.
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