Mark Van Hoen Playing With Time

At the cutting edge; Mark Van Hoen

IN THE FIRST OF A NEW SERIES OF PROFILES ON EXPERIMENTAL, CUTTING-EDGE COMPUTERMUSICIANS, ALLOW US TO INTRODUCE MARK VAN HOEN, A MAN WHO BLENDS OLD AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND SOUNDS TO TUG AT YOUR HEART AND BAFFLE YOUR BRAIN...

Perhaps best known as the man behind sonic experimentalists Locust, and backed by a brace of acclaimed releases on the seminal R&S label, Mark Van Hoen has been exploring a spectrum of emotive electronic flavours for more than a decade; fusing and abusing new and old
techniques and technology to produce musicthat's as baffling as it is beautiful.

"I'd really like to write an album that sold millions but was actually very weird. it's adifficult thing to pull off, but something I'l lalways be working towards." Ensconced in his custom-built East London studio, Mark Van Hoen does his best to explain his musical raison d'etre. "In a way, I suppose I've always been< inspired by successful records that contain an element of the avant-garde - Strawberry Fields Forever, Laurie Anderson's Oh Superman, Japan's
Ghosts, music that you like and your mum likes as well, but for entirely different reasons."

Van Hoen's new solo album, Playing With Time, is a masterpiece of subtlety and extremes that takes it's inspiration from Eno, Stockhausen and Aphex Twin, among others. Conforming to the criteria of his openinggambit, it's a body of work that merges vintage
production concepts with obsessive attention to detail, from a man who excels at bringing abstract sounds into sharp focus with the help of some heavyweight hardware and software. Playing With Time stands out as a unique contemporary recording. Its rich, organic textures and absorbing atmospherics are the fruits of Van Hoen's tech-suss fused with his fondness for a bygone age of music production, as he reveals. "I'm really into 60s recordings. For me the classic period was 1965 to 1975 - The White Album, Sly and The Family Stone, Stevie Wonder- that's when all the great records were made. It was a time when technology was advancing from the pre-60s rudimentary standard, but nothing was digitised, and even transistors weren't that common in the recording process.
"That's one thing that really inspired me when I first heard the Portishead album," he continues. "I loved the way they'd captured that sound. It inspired me to try to achieve that kind of production intentionally. I'd sort of done it in the 80s because I didn't really know much about recording and I had shit equipment, but years later, listening back to music I made then, I discovered some amazing stuff that had come about by accident."

Indeed, some of these sounds were sampled and re-used on Playing With Time, although not without some advanced processing.
"I actually released an album about four years ago that was made up of whole tracks from the 80s, so I'd pretty much used up all the complete pieces," Mark explains. "But I went back to 4-track tapes from my old reel-toreel and found a store of material for the new album. There were loads of really nice rhythm iocips and strange noises that I can't even magine how I arrived at now, which I put into ProTools [high-end computer music system], edited, and built new tracks around."

Real Love, the stunning opener from 'Playing With Time' typifies the complexity of Van Hoen's aproach to song creation, combining additional and experimental practices. "Real Love' was written around the vocal part, 11 Lines . 'I wrote some words, thought of a modal key that I wanted it to be in and got the vocalist to sing various combinations of phrases, usingc notes in the modal scale. I knew that I wanted to do a lot of editing and generate new sourlds by effecting the voice, so I just wanted a source pool of notes and sounds to play . Then. with the electronic manipulation, it , created a kind of other-worldly character.
And make no mistake, Van Hoen puts in the hours with his effects and editing software to attain results that often sound effortlessly natural.
"In places, there'll be one word that reverbs for maybe 15 seconds, then I'll add a resonant filter or a cone filter at a certain note in the scale - in the key of the song so it generates a new chord. It's all quite thought out, he understates. "But I don't think that that necessarily validates a track - I've always wary of music that's< over- intellectual. It's not the process that's important, it's the effect on the listener. They shouldn't know how it's put together, it should just work."

Although developing tracks from single sounds or loops is a composition method that Van Hoen expounds the virtues of, his later work has taken it's lead from more established starting points "For the next Locust album we're actually writing all the tracks as songs on acoustic guitar, which is quite different to anything I've done in the past." he reveals . It's also going to be more pop than anything we've done before. We want to make them exist as catchy songs first, before I start messing with them. I will make them sound extreme, but I want them to remain pop songs. It's almost like remixing, in that you've got a very traditional sounding song that you've got to pull to pieces, while retaining the melody and the catchiness."

The guitar also features in Locust's live set-up, but, typically, not in a conventional sense. If you were fortunate enough to catch Massive Attack on their recent Mezzanine tour, chances are you'll have copped an ear Locust providing the tantalising warm-up which, for an outfit unaccustomed to performing in this way, was a rare treat. Van Hoen picks up the story, "I used to do stuff live with video sampling, and last year we were invited to do a show on French TV.
I couldn't use the video because the samples weren't cleared, so I thought, right, I'm gonna to play completely live, which was something we hadn't done before.
To be honest, I'd got bit fed up with the video thing anyway, because it was so static, so I enjoyed the challenge. Sufficiently enamoured by the experience, Locust set about promoting their Morning Light album with further live dates. "Locust used to be the more experimental side of my output," Van Hoen explains, But it evolved into vocal music that was more pop, if you like, so it made sense to present in a way that people are used to."
Hence the Massive Attack tour? "That was a very interesting experience," he confirms. "We played as a fourpiece; the drummer played a Drum Kat, I was using a
Roland VG-8 guitar synth through a Line Six amp, and there was bass and vocals. We were creating a lot of live loops with the Lexicon JamMan [a basic sample and hold rack unit], and I found the freedom of being able to extend songs and improvise really liberating."

Mark Van Hoen is vigorous in his defence of the programmer as a musician, and of computer technology as a valuable creative medium, but remains a commited exponent of minimalism and experimentation in music.

"You still meet people, primarily nonmusicians, who don't believe that the idea of programming music is valid, and assume that you're not a proper musician unless you play a traditional instrument," he bemoans. "When I first got into music, I was listening to things like Stockhausen, Kraftwerk, John Cage, Can, and Eno, of course,
who's championing of nonmusicianship established him as the guru, and I've always believed in that mode of thought. It's like classically trained musicians, they're not really in touch with the true spirit of music, they've kind of stripped out all the soul by over-learning." He relates a recent incident to illustrate the point, and eloquently sums up his musical philosophy at the same time: "A very technically good musician criticised my band when we were on the Massive Attack tour. He said we couldn't really play, which I took as a compliment, because I saw what he did ...jazz wank. I've never really enjoyed that selfindulgent, too-many-notes thing; I've always thought that one good note can say more than a hundred. To me, it's far better to zoom in on small details rather than be bombarded..."