CHVE
CHVE stands for Colin H. van Eeckhout, the frontman of Belgium’s post-metal band Amenra, who, after numerous releases over the course of more than ten years with his band.
CHVE aka Colin H. van Eeckhout is releasing his first solo album on Consouling Sounds and 2015. RASA is where he challenged himself to start over again, musically and
spiritually. Now only able to rely on himself, he tried to tell his
story in his own new way. Ritual and Drone gave way for his solitary
self and sorrows to drown in a musical river of woe.
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Often, when drone music is mentioned in relation to ritual practices I
come upon the idea of an electronics-based modernist primitivism, full
of loops and delays and other manipulative techniques that link to new
relationships to new technologies. Few are the instances where things
are much more straightforward than that, where the ritual practice
intends to leave the modern behind and simply state the primitivism of a
new era. CHVE, the solo output of Colin H. van
Eeckhout, who is half of Belgian post-metal duo Amenra, seems to
approach drone in a way that emphasizes its naturalistic rhythmic base.
In this sense, 10910 is a live recording of his previous album, Rasa,
done in one take in a single place. Armed solely with his voice, a
hurdy-gurdy (an ancient string instrument that’s been sort of a favorite
with experimental musicians for a while now) and a bodhrán (a small
Irish frame drum that seemed to have evolved from the tambourine in the
19th century), CHVE provides an entrancing base whose
raga-like qualities are undeniable, and which without any sort of modern
manipulation come to stand ‘naturally’ on their own: a drone music
based not so much upon the intersection of technology and Asian
spirituality but on more traditionally European folk forms.
Leaving the intervention of technology in terms of recording process aside, 10910 could
be interpreted to be the extension of the commonplace idea of folk
music as being inherently closer to the everyday, its instruments
belonging to the domain of an unprofessional, naturalized skill that is
passed down in a tradition embodied by those who care to look backwards
and find value in the preservation of a living history. The artist’s
voice builds a profundity through echoes, a sense of space that in the
droning repetition of the hurdy-gurdy seems continually at a loss, its
singular tones stretching space and time into a line. The voice,
spectrally reminiscent of medieval chants, points at the orality of
that history, with the peculiarities of its development often coming to
oppose or at least contrast with the more archival, institutionalized
appreciations of the worth of a music or its instruments – everyone
knows what a violin is, but the same cannot be said for the hurdy-gurdy
or the bodhrán. The depth granted by the voice and its echo is both of
the present and the past, like a haunting in which a tradition once lost
(like that of the hurdy-gurdy, which by the end of the first half of
the 20th century was rare) suddenly and nightmarishly comes back to life in a time no longer properly its own.
Nature, in this form, is therefore not just a simplified rendition of
a clichéd idealism but a struggling echo that simultaneously fades and
resists disappearance: the relentless drumming and the brief and acute
hurdy-gurdy melody that arises at about half-way through the sole
26-minute track grant it with a solidity unmatched by the
voice. It is not the base drone what provides the music with a presence —
with its sheer, continual flatness – it is the interplay between the
melody, the drums, and the ghostly voice. This is our primitivism,
a folk music drone of loss and mourning in which the natural is
something to be ritually invoked so as to contemplate its disappearance
and not its permanence. Tread carefully, for each resonant tone is a
dream of a vastness once inherited.
(David Murrieta)
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