Belgian producer and visual artist Niels Orens self-releases his debut extended player, ‘Make Null & Void‘, alongside a quaternary of videos that highlight the nuance in Orens’ music, and the intrinsic aspect of collaboration within the EP.
Inspired by working alongside revered producer Max Cooper on his latest album, Orens’ efforts for ‘Make Null & Void‘ are experimental as much as they are musical: ekeing out smooth sounds from his cello, sounds not unmarred by their passage through a grated gate, which gradually opens allowing the sounds full roam across the track.
Prior to the ungated sounds, however, the listener’s attention is directed towards the minutiae, the stuttering windows of sound sounding akin to modular synthesis. Orens’ wishes, in the music, are to direct the attention towards these details while also allowing broader, more dancey, strokes to shine fully, in a likening to the way the mind parses the infinite complexity of the world .
Inspired by this phenomenon, Orens started out with the concept of learning and daily activities to create the particle-based world of the music video for ‘Hidden Complexity‘.
“The world is way too complicated to be aware of every tiny detail, so the only way to navigate through it is to hide a lot of its complexities. The box in the video is the safe space we all know, where the layers of complexity are filtered out, but once you break it, all the details will be revealed.“
As the gate that chokes the music is gradually opened, the particles’ energy increases, shifting in colour and position around the mould of a cube frame which represents our world-view. As the form of the cube becomes more apparent, the micro-detail of each particle becomes a whirlwind the eye cannot track, disappearing from the attention as the crescendo grows stronger.
‘Make Null And Void’ is out now. Order a copy from Bandcamp.
