Mark Van Hoen - The Revenant Diary

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5...according to our Brian on Thu 12 Jan, 2012.

Bloody hell, here's that man, back once again! Former Seefeel collaborator and legendary ambient dubster Van Hoen has been lounging on the periphery of electronica for yonks now. I still cane his 'Warmth Inside You' opus on a regular basis, one of the best soundtracks for the ZZZ generation you'll ever discover. What's this new baby like? Well the opener is classic mid-'90s style ambient techno with a cool dubby groove that bears all the hallmarks of his best outings. It ain't particularly futuristic but it sure is a top ranking Van Hoen outing. After that 'Garabandl x' marries shimmering elegiac synth to stumbling glitch and in Mark chucks some amazing trippy electronic architecture to create something thoroughly startling and original. Subsequent tracks further update that spiritual old style ambient dub sound with house-esque vocal loops, stately gliding synth lines and mid-tempo beats. On other tracks you find low-end zig-zags and pulses dancing around morphing grainy textures, trippy techno judders and the glistening twitters of the smartest artificial intelligence! It's the considered use of rich bass that marks this as his territory most clearly. Managing to fuse retro styles with contemporary production is probably the only realistic way forward as there's something to offer all generations of dance music lover. I find a lot of modern electronica is lacking in soul and vibrancy due to a propensity for technological over-indulgence, bewildering banks of irritatingly day-glo synths and smart-arsed beat mangling. I don't want to hear three tunes at once, I'm not that good a multi-tasker. See Van Hoen never forgets that for a truly rewarding trip you need a strong rhythm and a sublime beat. Nothing rushed or over-saturated here. 'The Revenant Diary' is rammed full of real feeling and a laid-back dynamism so it totally gets my money thrown at it. The young pretenders to his untroubled throne can go and throw themselves in a lake for all I care, this is quite possibly the finest album I've heard from him, a real nice surprise for someone that's been in the game 20 odd years. I think this may well be AOTW for Phil and I at least!

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All titles composed by Mark Van Hoen
Recorded in Brooklyn & Woodstock NY USA 2011
All instruments & processing by Mark Van Hoen with additional vocals by Georgia Belmont
Cover art by Stephen O' Malley

“Don’t Look Back”, repeats one of several voices within Mark van Hoen’s The Revenant Diary, his fifth solo album and first release on Editions Mego. Surrounded by weighted beats, analogue synthesizer drones and granular dirt, the unidentified, siren-like female voice’s advice is as much seduction as warning. Tellingly so, for as well as being both Van Hoen’s most ambitious and his most accessible work, The Revenant Diary is an eloquent meditation on the allures and dangers of memory, regret and nostalgia.

The album's foundation was shaped by a memory and a chance encounter. While remastering some of his early 90s releases and Peel Session tracks, Van Hoen – a founding member of Seefeel, who also worked as Locust and in Seefeel offshoot Scala and has collaborated with Slowdive, Robert Fripp, Edison Woods & Esben and the Witch amongst others – happened upon a track he had recorded in 1982. Attracted by its simplicity, he was inspired to record the basis of The Revenant Diary on 4-track tape, using a minimal set-up, reminiscent of his first early 80s musical adventures as a young teenager. The recollection of one of these – a 13 year old Van Hoen's experiment in reel-to-reel tape recording of an ineffectual pop song playing on the radio, which spuriously transformed it into a spooky amalgam of backwards church organ and unintelligible voices – provided an evocative inspiration.

The Revenant Diary pivots on this combination of complex reflection and simplified technology. A determinedly analogue affair, it brims over with Van Hoen’s signature sounds: immersively decayed drones, almost broken ambient surfaces and lulling rhythms, with granular crackle providing spectral grit. Fragments of female vocals pepper the album, and notably dominate the 10- minute epic “Holy Me”, one of Van Hoen’s most complex compositions, in which non-verbal sounds rub delicately against each other in an otherworldly choral composition.

Less song-based than his last solo work, the well-received Where Is The Truth [City Centre Offices, 2010], its palette and structure are more descendants of the 1995 album Truth Is Born Of Arguments, which utilised a similar combination of decayed atmosphere against a granular / glitch rhythmic structure. Tracks like “Laughing Stars At Night” and “Unknown Host” exude a powerful emotional undertow, as alluringly woozy as they are intensely contemplative. But this is no exercise in Instagram-style disposable nostalgia. Van Hoen’s adroit juxtapositions of gauzy textures evoke the blurred luminescence of 16mm film and the rich, colour-saturated hues of rediscovered Polaroid photos, as the cover artwork, designed by Stephen O’Malley, acknowledges. The Revenant Diary expertly renders displaced memory daze in lushly melodic, gently delirious electronic sound.

Tracklisting:

       1. Look Into My Eyes
       2. Garabndl x
       3. Don't Look Back
       4. I Remember
       5. No Distance (Except the One Between You and Me)
       6. 37/3d
       7. Where Were You
       8. Why Hide From Me
       9. Unknown Host
       10. Laughing Stars At Night
       11. Holy Me

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