Flin van Hemmen: You Can Know Where The Bombs Fell

The Dutch-born guitarist turned drummer turned pianist turned studio sound engineer Flin Van Hemmen follows Casting Spells & The Coves (Neither/nor Records, 2019) with You Can Know Where The Bombs Fell, another artifact of his post production and processing of recorded sound. He makes use of samples from the Casting Spells sessions, but unlike that release, the individual voices of Todd Neufeld and Eivind Opsvik are only barely recognizable. This outing is more field recording, best described as the the soundtrack to an imaginary world.

While these sounds were created by combining sampled music, environmental sounds, voices, and van Hemmen playing various instruments in the studio, there's an organic feel to each track. "Heels Rise" loops what sounds like a church organ with flashes of prayer that repeat over a street scene. Listeners follow stiletto heels as they wend away from the service. Van Hemmen is in no hurry to give further explanation here. The night sounds of "Where Mushrooms Grow" begin in an outside environment before diving in to the DNA of the fungi for its perspective. Nature gives way to the urban with "Epoch" as city street and traffic sounds lead the ear into an industrial zone. For van Hemmen, experience is music, whether it is a scary nightmare forest ("Where the Bombs Fell") or the pulse of static electricity inside a microchip ("Made Visible"). The studio constructions heard here feel like they are anything but fabricated. His success is this natural unselfconscious document.

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