Following his last record for Dell’Orso collecting three years of tracks from his Bandcamp, Mark Van Hoen returns to the label with an album travelling much further and wider in scope and sound. The material on The Eternal Present spans three decades of his versatile career, yet they all sound like they could have been made today. It speaks not only to the album’s titular concept, borrowed from American writer Joseph Campbell’s ideas about eternity as experience and existence rather than a timespan, but to the persistence of the diverse influences on his work, and his own mark on electronic music history.
The Eternal Present does a lot of borrowing, in fact, as ideas and connections from Van Hoen’s past continuously crop in thickly atmospheric tracks. Way back in the late 90s, Van Hoen was releasing music on Apollo and Touch, collaborating with the likes of Seefeel and Neil Halstead, and those episodes of his life replay in the glistening cover of Slowdive’s ‘Shine’ featuring Rachel Goswell, alongside textural pieces overflowing with walls of ambience and cyclical rhythms, or the blurry morning dew guitars of ‘Xmas’ plucked quaintly like a high pitched music box. These aren’t nostalgic references, but recognitions of his musical past flowing through the present moment.
And as Van Hoen’s legacy flows through The Eternal Present, it snakes its way through more relatively recent productions to create a career long, cohesive snapshot of his skills. Detuned synths drift loosely across harmonies and pyrotechnic beats on ‘Multiplex’, while the jagged bass and distended vocal edits of ‘Only Me’ coalesce as a technoid rhythm splashes in a corrosive concoction. ‘Gone To The Unseen’ introduces the album on a more emotional note, with piano and mellotron lamenting in the flurry of resonant pads, dancing a delicate dirge as the ambience bristles into a blizzard.
From gently weaving melody to gale force rips and tears, The Eternal Present shows Mark Van Hoen at all angles of his sonic practice.
