Lieven Martens

Poole Music is thrilled to announce its inaugural commission, the Habu, the latest full-length from Belgium’s Lieven Martens. For the better part of two decades, Martens has been expanding his Aloha-bedecked musical vision, transitioning from the basement tape environments of his Dolphins into the Future project to the rich compositional tapestries of more recent post-exotica modernist works.

The Habu represents a true culmination of these identities in one of his most ambitious works to date. The album’s three pieces cast an omniverous net that explores those fragile tendriles between imagined and real, natural and fabricated, unity and chaos; concrete sounds enabling abstract inner landscapes. With the ecstatic revelry of Marco Polo returning to his queen, Lieven brings us gems from all corners of the navigable world: tales of an impossibly guilded Portugese palace, a fertility tonic conjured from a poisionous serpent, a simulacrum of Honolulu. At a moment when the world is more geographically isolated than it has been in generations, Martens’ the Habu is a welcome odyssey, a Charybdian travelogue of the psyche. About face.

• 01 prelude a fragmentary oriental dream
• 02 suite sentimentale e mini-male i
• 03 suite sentimentale e mini-male ii
• 04 suite sentimentale e mini-male iii
• 05 the habu snake an archipelago i
• 06 the habu snake an archipelago ii
• 07 the habu snake an archipelago iii
• 08 the habu snake an archipelago iv
• 09 the habu snake an archipelago v
• 10 the habu snake an archipelago vi
• 11 the habu snake an archipelago vii
• 12 the habu snake an archipelago viii