Tag: Natasha Morrow

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Locust Shares Yearning “Love Stays”

Mark Van Hoen is a London-born and based electronic music artist, who has written, recorded and released music with his best-known project Locust, with Autocreation and under his own name. Originally influenced by Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream and others, Van Horn’s music career started in earnest back in 1993 hen he signed with  Belgian-based label R&S. His initial releases as Locust saw him using vintage analog synthesizers and tape recorders. But as his sound moved towards an increasingly vocal orientated approach in the late 1990s, he also began releasing material under his own name. 

Van Hoen also collaborated with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in Black Hearted Brother, a project that released their debut Stars Are Our Home in 2013. 

The London-born and-based electronic music artist’s latest Locust album. the 10-song, Spectral + was released last week through TODO Records. The album follows significant anticipation from fans of the project since Van Hoen assembled a new live band featuring musician and KCRW/NTS Radio DJ Olive Kimoto (vocals, keys), Derek Mabra (guitar) and Jaelyn Valero (drums). The Locust live band played their first shows last year, the project’s first live shows since opening for Massive Attack back in the 1990s. And since then, the project has fleshed out and road-tested the material, which would eventually comprise Spectral + – with some portions of the material developed further onstage. “We’re establishing this identity as a live band — we’ve really bonded, all really good friends, all rooting for it,” Locust creative mastermind Mark Van Hoen says. “People can see we’re a tight band, they’re not hired hands.”

The albums’s material moves between oceanic drone and pop songcraft, threading orchestral stings and understated guitars through Van Hoen’s signature synth work. The seems him working with the sound that helped create IDM in the 90s while finding new shapes to move in.  “This record contains a broad spectrum of songs that are an assimilation of my influences and my own earlier music,” Van Hoen says. ” It’s contemplative, sometimes melancholy, sometimes abrasive and pastoral.” The album’s tile reflects the sheer variation, the range of color across the album’s songs.

“Olive Kimoto (vocals, keyboards) instigated all this.,” Van Hoen says of his collaborations with Kimoto. “I was playing a solo show in September 2024, and she came to that – she had been running a club called Heaven or Los Angeles, a Cocteau Twins reference which I immediately liked. We met, and she said how much she liked my music. She did a two-hour radio special with me on my music, and we decided to collaborate.”

Spectral + includes the previously released “Long Distance Lover,” a collaboration with Slowdive‘s Neil Halstead and Natasha Morrow and the album’s latest single “Love Stays.” “Love Stays” features a seemingly Surrender-era The Chemical Brothers-like production of twinkling keys and skittering and chugging boom bap beneath guest vocalist Omotola’s soulful and yearning delivery singing lyrics about love and working things out.

The video by Locust’s Mark Van Hoen features Omotola as a spectral and technicolor siren, singing the song’s lyrics directly to the viewer.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Locust Teams Up with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead and Natasha Morrow on Yearning “Long Distance Lover”

Mark Van Hoen is a London-born and based electronic music artist, who has written, recorded and released music with his best-known project Locust, as well as with Autocreation and under his own name. Originally influenced by Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream and others, Van Hoen’s music career started in earnest back in 1993 when he signed with Belgian-based label R&S. His initial releases as Locust saw him using vintage analog synthesizers and tape recorders. But as his sound moved towards an increasingly vocal orientated approach in the late 1990s, he also began releasing material under his own name.

Van Hoen also collaborated with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in Black Hearted Brother, a project that released their debut Stars Are Our Home in 2013.

The English electronic music artist’s latest Locust single “Long Distance” features Neil Halstead on guitar and vocals from Irish musician Natasha Morrow. The lush and dream-like collaboration came together over the past few years and features shimmering and pulsating, Giorgio Moroder-like synths, Halstead’s reverb drenched shoegazer textured riffs meticulously draped and sculpted over the synths while Morrow’s yearning delivery expresses a longing for intimacy despite a physical distance.

“The music was recorded back in 2020 originally as a collab between Neil Halstead and I,” Van Hoen recalls. “It sat around for a few years, and I had the idea to send it to Natasha to see if it inspired anything vocally. She came up with the idea of long-distance phone calls between lovers. It struck a chord with me as I had experienced a couple of relationships like that. The idea of repeating these expressions of desire and longing over and over, because you are aching to be together. I had actually never met Natasha, and generally, I find that remote collabs don’t work because there’s a connection missing somehow. But in Natasha’s case, I had several long phone calls with her, and I think we connected that way. Not in any romantic sense, but as musical collaborators, which has its own particular need for a personal connection and understanding. I found it interesting that it related to the song’s lyrics in that she and I established a different kind of personal bond over the phone.”

The accompanying video by Mark Van Hoen features the song’s collaborators in silhouette dipping in and out of the frame, which helps further accentuate the distance, longing and ephemeral nature of the song’s central relationship.