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.