Mark Van Hoen, SPC ECO at Fear and Loathing

The world can be a very bizarre, very loud place at times. The insane volume of the current year’s unimpressive conclusions mixed with the annoying murmur of lives in motion, cars starting in the morning, empty laughter on lunch breaks, and meaningless chatter that booms within the walls of happy hour every day. December comes strutting in like a wounded woman, unknowingly beautiful feeling painfully invisible, but if you attempt to strike up a conversation, you will feel the sting of her disgust with reality. Art should never refer to itself as art. Those who observe it and flirt with it should decide that. The state of modern music is perplexing in many ways. Sonic introductions now reduced to a Tinder-like existence, swipe left, reject, swipe right, and listen. The average person now has an attention span of around seven seconds or so. This concept and fact-finding method has been applied to cinema, music, and newsfeeds that we all partake in. Flash and grab, strike a nerve, rattle an emotion but you better make it fast. I guess people are pretty scared to jump into the pool, the unpredictable chill of immersion. But then again it is December, and it does get pretty fucking cold.

Rearranged moods and obsessive grooves are the name of the game in two current releases that I’ve been letting myself get lost in recently. Saint Marie Records is a relatively new label with its own distinctive sound, there’s a certain crispness and mysterious hum within all of its releases. Whether it’s post-punk, shoegaze, dark-dream, or indie pop, each release is unique because it’s very obvious that artistic vision and creative prowess come before the need to launch “the next big thing”. The sounds of unhinged lust, jilted lovers, jealous rage, uncooperative desire, and mind-altered contemplation come to life in the latest albums by SPC ECO and Mark Van Hoen.

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