DELL’ORSO 20 June 2025
You CAN judge this album by the title. I imagined a thoughtful set of pieces traversing time and space in a New-Agey way and that’s what I got. An imaginative collection of pieces and mood yet also serving as a reflective tool. One listen on a journey, headphones, eyes closed, brought on hypnagogic visuals, other listens in a more lucid state bring thoughts of EDM, fragments of lyric, fluttering sounds, sweeping moods. This electronic album is deeply thought out and composed to maximise the potential of the human brain by massaging it through the ears until it becomes pliable enough to squeeze into higher places.
After a pensive opening, piano picks out a tune amid sequencer patterns. Some spoken word and deep rumbling bass sounds surface and the album progresses with blends of choral effects, industrial effects and a remarkably pervasive depth. As time passes, a spiritual dimension builds up, with yearning vocal lines contrasting with immersive rhythms made of sand-textured elements. Things get droney in a good way and hypnotic before an absolutely thumping marching beat crunches through the last track.
Drawing comparison with Tangerine Dream, Autechre, Aphex Twin, even Cabaret Voltaire, Mark Van Hoen has been known under the Locust name in the nineties, when EDM music was developing and moving on from rave. He was and is a face creating new shapes of music and new ways for it to be.
I’m genuinely surprised to read that the album is sourced from recordings over a thirty year period. There is an emotional depth and consistency that belies this and says much for how it has been absorbed into a timeless space, the Eternal Present of the title. Van Hoen quotes from Golden Bough author, Joseph Campbell; “Eternity isn’t some later time… Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off.” Music is simultaneously durationally present as a moving and changing thing, yet one piece is a distinct thing, existing in sound, time and memory.
This is a consistently scenic trip through time and space but also a genuinely emotional journey possessing a depth of feeling not often found in EDM.
