66. Mark van Hoen

Director's cut of a review published in The Wire #335 (January 2012)

Mark van Hoen 

The Revenant Diary 

Editions Mego CD/LP

Time is the alarming issue, the element most subject to the shearing pressure of social contradiction today. As average working weeks increase, we're enjoined ever more to indulge in colour-supplement leisure activities (“get making those memories”, as a recent advertising slogan had it). In the face of systemic crisis, we're haunted by the vague sense that time's running out; simultaneously, we seem to have more of it than ever – in abundant archives, in multiplying ephemeral media of memory-inscription (Twitter, Facebook, blogs). Like Blade Runner's Roy, our memories press maddeningly on the present, bursting into the body of music, blurring or sharpening their significances, at the moment they threaten to disappear “like tears in the rain”. As the archivists carry on their pursuits (witness the hauntological barrel-scraping of the Found Objects blog and the continuing vogue for 'austerity chic'), the quality of that time seems to matter increasingly little, just so long as it's past.

The latest solo album by former Seefeel member Mark van Hoen (who previously worked under the name Locust) seems to come with the same set of conceptual baggage as all the nostalgia-swollen albums of the past few years. But there is immediately a disturbing spark. The story goes: listening through his archive, van Hoen came across a track made in 1982 by his adolescent self, setting off a recall of even earlier recordings; in turn he was encouraged to try a more primitive recording set-up, of the kind he started out with: 4-track tape, minimal equipment. The potential dangers present themselves immediately: soft-focus recreation of simpler times, the sonic equivalent of the mid-life crisis car. From the first, though, he avoids them: the beats are rough, cutting hi-hats and a loping kick like distant depth-charges, frayed at the edges, synth-strings and female vocal as if imported from from a horror film. Nowhere, in fact, does the percussion become very sophisticated – as with his often somewhat portentous 90s work, van Hoen seems defiantly to occupy the only corner of electronica untouched by Techno and House's seductions. There's something queasy and out-of-joint about the mixing; it's as if van Hoen were adopting a deliberately broken language, feeling out the possibilities in stuttering, cracked versions of familiar gestures, of the slick, brooding digital productions that have dominated his catalogue to date. (Notably, where van Hoen sang on last year's Where Is The Truth, here the voices are borrowed, though whether from vocalist Georgia Belmont or sampled is hard to tell.)

This lure of primitivism seems to lie behind much of the last few years' fetishisation of analogue – think of the often clunky beats of Ekoplekz's catalogue, or the laborious, semi-aleatoric methods of Keith Fullerton Whitman's synth records. This partly evokes the relationship one has with sound-making technology when just starting out: the directness and simplicity with which one plays with sound, but also the physical particularity of analogue – tape recorders with their buttons that clunk, synths, drum-machines, guitars with their knobs for settings and tone, turntables and the motion of needles and record surfaces, all this that filled the adolescence of musicians of a certain age. It's unsurprising that van Hoen seems fascinated on this record by certain granular qualities of noise, the kind of roughened grain (usually applied by him to the voice) often arrived at by happy accident. The sonic account of adolescence in The Revenant Diary is far more interesting than the simplified version that lies at the core of, say, chillwave – and far truer to the difficulty of adult being. The perspective on the narrowness, the hateful, humiliating, unnecessary agonies of adolescence that hindsight purchases does so at the expense of its sense of possibility, of a meaning that saturates every second (and that spills out into overfilled diaries), from which it is in reality inextricable; van Hoen maintains this desire, this danger – adolescence as a wager, a roll of the dice.

Van Hoen's position is complicated by one of the narratives hiding behind The Revenant Diary: he was adopted as a child, a fact that became the sort-of subject matter of Where Is The Truth. To be suddenly dispossessed of a past, to have what lies at the centre of self-image disturbed: this, in fact, is our condition today. “Don't look back” warns the voice at the centre of the eponymous track – not because the past is somewhere to get stuck, preventing the subject from constructing the future (the traditional argument against nostalgia) but because its truth-content is put under question, if not hollowed-out. Van Hoen, notably, although working with an earlier set-up and methodology, doesn't use particular textural or pop-idiomatic signifiers (as hypnagogic pop does). In this respect (as in most others) the beatless tracks are most interesting: “37/3d” is a minimal construction of static burbles, pointillist synth and backward, overlapping voice; “No Distance” is the kind of haunted sequencer architecture explored on Oneohtrix Point Never's early releases; “Holy Me” is 9 and a half minutes of solo multi-tracked voice, I Am Sitting In A Room as remixed by Oval. There's a sense of suspension in these tracks: a glittering sadness, but a refusal of the particularising pathos of meaning, which pins sound to a particular time.

Diaries sought to organise life: month after month, year after year, experience is recorded. The present nostalgia for analogue media (tapes, vinyl records, chemical photography) and all its – as often as not trashy – content is also a longing for a moment when time could be experienced this way: coherent, slowly accumulative, humanly meaningful, experienced in the “pseudo-cyclical” (the phrase is from Guy Debord) passage of seasons and festivals. What is swiftly becoming clear is how useless nostalgia is to getting a grip on our own sense of time in the ongoing crisis – not least because it leaves us with the alienated figments of time, emptied of historicity, of what might be meaningful to our present. The Revenant Diary, spooking us in its best moments with the unremembered fragments of van Hoen's self, confounds all of that. It's a very good start.

65. Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Alternate version of a review published at The Quietus in November 2012.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

Constellation

There were always going to be any number of ways to approach this record, that the the writer rushes through serially or all at once: slowly, feeling out its subtleties and flaws, living with it as sound, as he once did with all the records that preceded it, or quick, in gut-level affirmation or negation, assigning it to its ready pigeonhole, freeing himself from the obligation to think about it further; as the reappearance of one of the most politically vital bands of the last 20 years, or as an intervention into a changed historical landscape that renders their critiques obsolete; as the pretext for autobiographical riot or faux-disinterested critical appraisal; as reaffirmation of the dignity of indie, so degraded since F# A# Infinity came out in 1997 or as experimental (whatever that means now) miasma; as a fractional addition to a monolithic body of work, or the best thing they've ever done.

The depths of ambivalence or contradiction that Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! provokes is justified enough by the album's substance to conclude that isn't simply the projection of this writer, already overfond of ambiguity. That title, with its almost parodically positivist screamers, is nicely misleading regarding the content. It would have been easy enough on re-emerging in 2010, especially given the somewhat lukewarm work that their sister act A Silver Mount Zion have been doing in the last few years, for Godspeed to play to the assumed image of what 'Godspeed' are: the big, parabolic structures, the soaring climaxes, the earnest altermondialiste politics that made sense in Seattle circa 1999. This would be to ignore the contradictions and ironies and aporias present in the band from the beginning. The apparently total purity of intent expressed in fleeting interviews and lo-fi sleeve artwork (not to mention the infamously mordant monologue at the start of 'The Dead Flag Blues', the first track on the first album: “The car is on fire and there's no driver at the wheel...”) was always altered in its charge by its presentation – the jokes (who didn't think the dedication to “the Reverend Gary Davis” was at least slightly funny?), the collision of different materials in the inner sleeve collages, the conflicting energies and textures of the songs, sliding and grinding from rage to placidity to uninvited noise to lullabies. The albums were, as the band suggested in a recent Guardian interview, “a joyous difficult noise”: their aesthetics bear the closest relation to punk, detonating their conflicting materials through negation, antagonism, to produce works of strange and searing energy. (The distance from Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts' council estate branded “Land Of Milk And Honey” to “Fuck la loi 78” on the sleeve of Allelujah!... is shorter than we might choose to think.)

All of this is a slightly roundabout way of saying two things. One: it turns out that the things about the band that enthralled the first time around – the sincerity, the leftism, the obscurity, the extremes of sound – were as much pop hook and manifesto as, say, anything in the early canon of Adam and the Ants (as masterfullyanalysed last week by Mark Sinker) – and that this is precisely where their politics, and their brilliance, reside. (Certainly when, on the last few Silver Mount Zion albums, Efrim Menuck's vocals have been unimpededly front-and-centre, the desperation seething within the collective's songs has been written in ten-foot-high slogans, untouched by context or irony, the results have been either comical or too painful to keep up.) Two: a decade's hiatus has given them the chance to sound more like themselves, as a collective entity, an idea, a mass of interacting forces, a project and intervention operating according to what they call their own “particular stubborn calculus”; more like Godspeed than 'Godspeed'. The two long tracks, 'Mladic' and 'We Drift Like Worried Fire', apportioned to a side each, press together all of their seemingly incompatible elements, and do so in a stronger, more boldly articulated way than the somewhat episodic progress of their last major statement, 2000's Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. The band sound here more like a collective sound generator than, as they did sometimes on previous records, a big band in which every section has to have its turn, as it were. Rather, field recordings, lambent drones, melody, concatenations of guitar noise, strings that veer into shredding atonality and back again, are all folded into structures whose thematic successions or juxtapositions feel dreamlike or counterintuitive. (The short tracks – 'Their Helicopters Sing' and 'Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable' – do something different, but more of that anon.) In this it reconnects with the distant, seemingly halcyon days when post-rock meant feverish drift through rock's debris – Disco Inferno, Gastr Del Sol, Bark Psychosis, Pram – rather than white guys playing rock slowly whilst looking sad. (Ten years of listening to other stuff has also allowed us to notice things like this.)

It's tempting at this point to zoom in on significant details – whether to draw a curtain over what opposition there might be to our preceding argument, or to highlight the strange political freight the record carries, or just because they sound so lovely: the jumping clatter of the Montreal casseroles at the end of 'Mladic'; the strafing slide guitar that starts about 2 minutes into that track; the scything treble guitar noise that cuts through the middle of 'We Drift...'; the wonky ebb to which the crackling noise of 'Strung Like Lights...' dwindles, as if heard on tape. But the tracks deserve to be taken in their entirety: 'Mladic' as a slow, groaning build to a thundering foment that breaks off, reiterates parts of itself – guitars strangled into noise as the drums – and slides into drawn-out breakdown, flaring up and burning out over and over; 'We Drift...' as a low, gathering drone that reaches a peak of treble noise simultaneously light as air and crushingly static, before a long, intricate patchwork of musical gestures leads into the repeated, ecstatic thrash of the ending. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson sees in 'Mladic' “the pummeling repetition of Swans and the fiendish drama of metal”, and certainly there's something of the latter-day Swans of 'Eden Prison' to it: harsh, pounding, with heavy mid-range and bass frequencies, but never locked into a temporally bound, teleological form, ready to stray into side-roads of atonal noise, its peeling apart from the central groove and remaking itself become the unfolding of its drama. (Notably there are moments when the drumming recalls a heavier version of Steve Shelley circa Daydream Nation, supporting and puncturing the song in equal measure.) The long tracks here are, nonetheless, hard to experience or hold in memory as entireties – too big, too detailed, too multiple. (We should put a word in here for the production of both Howard Bilerman, who recorded the long tracks, and the four members of Godspeed who recorded the short ones: there's a remarkable clarity and depth-of-field, the clashes or layerings of instruments satisfyingly dense without being mushy or congealed.) Gone is the guilty thought prompted by Yanqui U.X.O. that every next move was, if not predictable, at least intuitable; for the moment, it's all a surprise.

But more than all that, there's a palpable fierceness, a disciplined savagery, to the playing here – no doubt honed over a long period (both long tunes have been in the band's live repertoire, more or less, since before their hiatus in 2003), but not polished. Which makes what comes afterwards more genuine: the two shorter tracks (relegated to a dropped-in 7” on the vinyl version) each explore a moment that would have formed part of the succession of the longer tracks, probing atmospheres of breakdown, exhaustion and drift as if opening up the microcosmic heart of their work. 'Their Helicopters Sing' layers an almost improvisatory clash of circling, scraping string phrases over tape-drone and guitar that moves from hesitant to looming, as if choking back the fury that animated the violins on 'Mladic'. At this point, wearing my contrarian hat, I'll say that 'Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable' is the best thing on the album: bleeding in from the cut-off quiet at the end of 'We Drift...', it presents a rich, troubled drone, treble noise, heavy with the sound of instruments' resistant materiality – mistreated strings and e-bowed guitar – gathering and breaking over deeper, woozy pulses that come from nowhere and disappear just as mysteriously. It condenses and suggests the flicker, flash and clash of their collective elements, off to one side.

There's as much of a palpable freight to these obscured moments, these negatives of the fullness and presence of rock – and, as is always also the case, rock as a carrier of political discourse – as where they left off a decade ago: the brilliant first ten minutes of 'Motherfucker=Redeemer', the following cut-up of George W. Bush that, as Anwyn Crawford has pointed out, his “sound like – morph into – gunfire.” The most poignant moment in the Guardian interview comes when they talk about “the dull fact” of being a band: “we spend most of our time engaged with the task at hand – rehearsing, writing, booking tours. We do our best to get along, to stay engaged with each other and with the shared labour.... Nothing special, nothing interesting.” The press has talked almost incessantly about the timing of this release, its relevance to the current moment – or irrelevance, in the case of those who've complained about the attention being given to it. That remark by the band prompts a slightly different reflection, concerning what's changed politically since the dour days of the first Bush regime's mid-term – what possibilities have appeared, in Cairo, Tunis, Wisconsin, New York, London – and what continuities, what lack of progress, what causes for despair, still exist. It seems apposite to note how strange it is, this hard-won document of anger and lovely stasis and ghostly drift, just as popular struggle, at least in Britain and the post-Occupy US, seems to be undergoing its own moment of hiatus, when that arduous thought, of the “shared labour” of ordinary collectivity, of the contradiction and difficulty out of which cultural politics grows, seems the most counterfactual, and the most important. The album's meanings begin but don't end here, any more than the struggle itself does. But we can start by saying: listen; it's worth it.

64. Adam Curtis

Me on All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace at The Boar back in June 2011.

63. Jim Crace

Me on Jim Crace's All That Follows at The Cadaverine.

62. Hamlet

An essay by me at Constellations, the journal of undergraduate research, on Hamlet, haunting, political crisis & the birth-pangs of capitalism.

61. Geoff Dyer

Me on Geoff Dyer's Zona, at Review 31.

60. Gig Ryan

Me on Gig Ryan's Selected Poems at The Cadaverine.

59. 'We Are Poets'

Me on Daniel Lucchesi & Alex Ramseyer-Bache's film We Are Poets, at Reeling The Real.

58. Luke Fowler

Me on Luke Fowler's latest film, The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, at Reeling The Real.