In Alan Moore’s all-encompassing three book epic Jerusalem he carefully and painstakingly depicts the multi-generational lives of the inhabitants of the mediaeval centre of Northampton known as The Boroughs. Through tracing their surreal, mundane, magickal, exhaustive, and, at times, harrowing existences, Moore posits the notion of ‘Eternalism’: a theory in which all events, past, present and future, occur simultaneously. Much as geographical spaces still exist without our presence, the same can also be said for these instances of time. For Mark Van Hoen, the music he created nearly thirty years ago is equally concurrent with his recent sonic efforts.
Playing With Time, Ephemera, and now The Eternal Present: glancing across the album titles that the Croydon-born electronic artist has released on such vaunted labels as Apollo, Touch, and Editions Mego, it’s clear to see that the flow of time has been a constant throughout Van Hoen’s career. This latest offering brings together a quarter-century’s worth of recordings, dating back to 1998, from which he summons airy drones, chilled rhythms, and reverb-lit vocals courtesy of Clare Dove, Megan Mitchell, and Dorothy Takev.
Following the worried whirrs of an over-revved and loosely fitted wheel, ‘No-One Leave’ breaks out into an ambient beat ripe for a Café del Mar compilation, albeit scuffed up with whipped percussion and reversed drums that sound like bursts of deflating air. The track ‘Only Me’, which my quote-addled brain insists on reading in the voice of Harry Enfield’s perpetually irritating know-it-all character from … And Chums, only adds to the sense that this has been sourced from the tail end of the last century. And a cover of Slowdive’s shoegaze classic ‘Shine’ does little to distance Van Hoen’s 90s sensibilities. Clad with soaring synths, metallic gasps, hi-hat snaps, and the halcyon pipes of original vocalist Rachel Goswell, it glides off into a Y2K tizz.
Elsewhere, the thin, ghostly structure of ‘It’s Not You (In A Way)’ appears as if the marrow has been sucked out of it and there’s a touch of Squarepusher’s ‘Tommib’ on ‘Theme From The Present II’. In contrast, album closer, ‘Somewhere’, ends with shuddering drums rattling along like an old slam door train as electric keys shriek for the heavens, and ‘Xmas’ smushes a seasonal Coca-Cola jingle into a warble of digital bells as if being played on 300 unsynchronised musical greetings cards.
Placing eternity as the here and now implies that our perception of events is about perspective rather than the chronological experience that we’re typically led to believe. Some might find that a rather handy device for music that sounds like it has been thrust forward from the 90s but that’s not to say this record’s mood is unenjoyable, reaching back, as it does, across the decades. It’s never propulsive enough to warrant a dancefloor workout nor does it recline into full chillout mode ambient. Instead, it slides through time, leaving musical snapshots in its wake, like polaroids dangling from a line.
