Bleep

With his immensely prolific discography, Mark Van Hoen is happy to show multiple sides to his music and breathe new life into old tracks. His 2024 album Plan For A Miracle is built up from tracks released over some years on his Bandcamp page, while the followup record (and “in many ways companion piece”) The Eternal Present pulls from decades of material. And just like in the good old days decades ago when you could count on every single having an intriguing B side, Van Hoen has packed EPs leading up to The Eternal Present with a generous helping of bonus tracks, now collected on the Only Me cassette celebrating his Bleep Record of the Month.

These tracks, appearing on EPs for ‘Multiplex’, ‘XMAS’, and ‘Only Me’, come from the “same pool” as the aforementioned albums, and speak to Van Hoen’s productivity and wealth of ideas. ‘Artesea’ brings his days in Seefeel’s early incarnation to mind with its undulating textural sea, and pendulums of strings similarly swinging in and out of view, blissful in contrast to the stirring, ghostly leftfield acid of ‘If You Could Just Be’, pitting starlit chords against blown out, gnashing shuffles like glitch beatboxing.

Forcefully pulverising beats and breezy analog synth trickles and starbursts aplenty, the tracklist serves the same variety and tender electronic exploration that Van Hoen serves on his albums. We open with the slack downtempo beat of ‘Vision Plus’ echoing into infinity with dubwise acid stabs, and the swishing, swaying, ricocheting rhythm of ‘Air France’, and close with the brewing scifi wonder and mystery of ‘The Trees’ unfurling over a long crescendo, leading to the longest track by far ‘Distances’, a buzzing slowburn ebbing and flowing in intensity.