Published by Davide Pappalardo on November 23, 2016
Born in the Netherlands, now located in Copenhagen, Denmark, Zeno Van Den Broek is a multimedia artist who uses sounds and visuals as means to an audiovisual work which request from us the use of more than one of our senses, experimenting with a different way to live the experience of an album. He takes inspiration from architecture, mathematical and physical concepts due to his researches in these fields, and his approach is endorsed by Establishment Records, a modern German label founded by electronic music artist Peter Kirn, which has a catalog based on transmedia releases in various genres.
In 2015 he published Divergence for Moving Furniture Records, an experimental affair with drone and glitch sounds, and now he returns with the EP Shift Symm for the aforementioned label Establishment Records. As in the tradition of the label, we have a digital album where visuals and sounds are linked in an all-encompassing experience which transcends the barrier between artistic expressions, going beyond the traditional concept of a music product. A new view for a digital world where many options haven’t been explored yet, a distinct character for a brave imprint trying to offer a new way to live music and art.
The work is based on three tracks which develop a movement meant to give us sonic sculptures in an architecture made of sounds, shifting patterns, and sound symmetry. To fully understand the nature of the work, the visual side and the music must be experienced at the same time in the limited audiovisual edition available from Sedition Art: a hypnotic path where the roots of electronic music are rediscovered in their more experimental and forward-thinking fashion.
The first emanation uses ambient and glitch elements in a droning loop, which develops in a mantra met by shrilling sounds and field recordings. A crawling crescendo played on few elements obsessively repeated, while new disturbances are added along the way, until we reach a rusty atmosphere not very far from early industrial sounds. The second one is based on digital textures abruptly stopped in a glitching movement with an almost ritualistic quality, an atavistic sound which even knows rhythmic sequences developed by a simple and hypnotic beat. The raw elements used here keep a musical side, showing us an artist skilled at his songwriting. The interplay between syncopated tension and digital, unnerving sounds is the backbone of the track. The third and final one keeps the same peace of the others, using noisy elements and tribal percussion, layering everything on a dissonant and shrilling atmosphere built upon oscillating sounds and loops. A factory-like effect is reached in modular development, reaching a climax made not by explosion, using instead calculated implosions and unorthodox rhythms.
An artistic experience which manage to be experimental and listenable (for the lovers of a certain kind of electronic music), giving us audiovisual sculptures with a coherent narrative, best experienced together with the visual patterns created to accompany them. We suggest to look for it and the other works of Establishment Records, an underground reality which tries to push forward the concept of arts and music, offering something beyond the stale ideas taken for granted in today’s panorama.
Label: Establishment Records
Rating: 7,5