Graced with cover art courtesy of Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, Mark Van Hoen’s ‘The Revenant Diary’ is a magnificent musical odyssey. For his fifth solo release, the former Seefeel founder had plundered his old recordings and dissected them using the most basic of analogue kit – a four-track – as his primary tool. The result is an album that’s evocative and somehow manages to be sparse in arrangement yet dense in sound and texture.
There’s so much swirled into the mix here that’s it’s impossible to break it down and dissect, and in many ways, this is one of the album’s primary strengths. It’s all in there: Kraftwekian Krautrock, complete with motoric mechanised drums and space-age bubbling synth sounds intermingle with far-out passages of expansive ambience and elements lifted from eastern music.
Dubby bass tones and shuffling beats skulk in the dark, half-hidden amidst washes of reverb while rich atmospherics, ominous sounds and fragments of female vocal creep in and out of range. The individual tracks merge into one another to create a holistic album listening experience. At times gentle and calming, at others eerie, and others still disorientating, Van Hoen makes full use of the effects of stereo and dynamic range to create a soundtrack that worms its way around the listener’s skull, occasionally placing sounds that unexpectedly leap out from the background to take the listener by surprise.
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Just as the sounds are constantly shifting, mutating and evolving, so ‘The Revenant Diary’ is a fascinating sonic experience that reveals more with each listen.
Mark Van Hoen Online
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