Review: Zeno Van Den Broek - Divergence

This is the sound of the space-time blanket bloating and twisting. The “happened” and the “happening” rub against eachother like tectonic plates, as humming bass frequencies confront their fragmented, tape-processed former selves in the mirror of music production. A nervous, nauseous whirr presents itself in varying degrees of obfuscation: sometimes clear enough to taste, sometimes a tattered scrap of the original wave. Time overlaps and intersects. A clock with eight separate minute hands, splayed across the face like weird tentacles of memory and experience.

The sense of urgency and danger never leaves. I hear the low frequency equivalent to heart ventricles throbbing; drones slurping and contracting. Red lights pulsing; warning strobes illuminating corridors in blood during a critical submarine malfunction; omnipresent alarms submerging the vessel in a state of high alert. I hear various states of size and translucency. Faint synthesisers stroke the hairs of my subconscious, while other buzzes slam down on my head like gigantic electrified hammers, fierce and violently plosive. Sometimes I strain to pick out the tiny, intricate lines of detail (Morse code messages in high squeals, white noise channeled through artificial reverbs that arc and phase before they land). Other times, my body is flooded with such high volume that I feel sick. I cower and duck to avoid the snip of gigantic scissors, and jolt awake to the knock of steel-capped footsteps at the other end of the hangar. I dislodge myself from my reality while feeling vividly present within it, as a body both vacated and bruised.