FOREST SWORDS — THE LOW

⌾ LISTEN TO THE LOW BY FOREST SWORDS ⌾

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'The Low' cuts a mysterious figure. From the outset it's a cavalcade of metallophonic glonking, bone-rattling clacks, rusted but razor sharp hi-hat sheafings and thumping distorted tambor booms to keep time. A druidic ritual crossed with a downtempo warehouse number, this altered beast of trip hop crouches loaded with potential to pounce at any moment.

Vocals rise up, plucked from the air and woven throughout the bristling beats like a sea breeze blowing through craggy sea stacks and yawning arches. But in a triumph of dynamism, rather than trail off like a will-o'-the-wisp the phantom noise is cut short, suddenly revealing once more the silence and scratch of the song. (In fact, the whole thing is truncated, snipped at the end into a full-stop).

Add to this a skirling, distorted call of distorted brass proportions — how you might imagine a carnyx to sound — and there is urgency here, but a fogged ancient urgency, like a message from the actual earth, but summoned in a Liverpool warehouse by Forest Swords.

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• 🔔 It's official: there's a new Forest Swords album coming out. It's called Bolted and it's arriving 20th October via Ninja Tune; you can pre-order it on Bandcamp now digitally, on vinyl, CD and cassette. 'The Low' follows previous single 'Butterfly Effect', also taken from the upcoming album.

  Forest Swords (aka Matthew Barnes) explains that it's "based on a beat I’d originally intended for Yoko Ono." It's an important track, too, and "features elements I made both at the start and end of the album," he says, "so ties together a lot of the sounds and emotions I was exploring during the writing process."

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☟ Forest Swords Internet Presence ☟
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FOREST SWORDS — BUTTERFLY EFFECT (REMIXES)

⌾ LISTEN TO BUTTERFLY EFFECT REMIXES BY FOREST SWORDS ⌾

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Last month Forest Swords (real name: Matthew Barnes) gave us a taste of a longform project to come. Arriving in the form of a double single, 'Tar' and 'Butterfly Effect', these showcase the eminence of a composer-producer in sculpting new worlds using the same electronic materials, quarried deep from the earth in muddy handfuls, precious clumps.

'Tar' sees Barnes conjure a distorted sonata, skittering noises creeping in the background, like a lament for preserved Neolithic body encased in the track's titular substance. And featuring a previously unheard Neneh Chery sample, 'Butterfly Effect' cracks with living-and-breathing percussion, shards of ancient noises, mosaicked into a beat fit for a bog bonfire.

Most recently come the remix treatments for the latter in a love-letter to UK dance music. A fragmented, shuffling garage beat plays out in 'Drizzlah's Club Remix', the Neneh Cherry vocal weaving among scrambled popping melodies, while the 'Basement Dub Remix' slows things down, imbuing a dub groove with the soul of the original, synth skirling like a haunted melodica.

More dance-inflected fun arrives in the clean-cut collage of percussion in the 'DJ Ron Dixon Clubstep Mix', which is beset with a mash and melding of dissonant synths. Perhaps most fitting partner for the original 'Butterfly Effect', however, is the 'FS Ambient Air Mix' - like a phantom stretched thin, it falls as a giant sheet enveloping moorland, all fizzing greys and gleaming calls to the other side. Throughout these nocturnal, evnveloped remixes, there's a satisfying contrast at work, bringing the twigs and tarot of Forest Swords into distinctly synthetic, contemporary spaces.

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• 🔔 This collection of new music from Forest Swords is available to purchase and stream at your leisure over on his Bandcamp. They've been released ahead of some tour dates (below)
• 🔔 Forest Swords tour dates:
  Saturday 2nd September - Varpalota, Hungary: INOTA Festival
  Sunday 17th September - Sofia, Bulgaria: Wrong Fest
  Thursday 2nd November - Manchester, UK: White Hotel
  Friday 3rd November - Newcastle, UK: Cluny 2
  Saturday 4th November - Glasgow, UK: Mackintosh Church for Great Western Festival
  Friday 10th November - London, UK - ICA
  Saturday 18th November - Paris, FR - Badaboum
  Monday 20th November - Brussels, BE - AB Club
  Tuesday 21st November - Amsterdam, NL - Bitterroot
  Wednesday 22nd November - Arnhem, NL - Willemeen
  Thursday 23rd November - Leipzig, DE - UT Connewitz
  Tuesday 28th November - Athens, GR - Municipal Theatre Of Piraeus
  Tuesday 5th December - Copenhagen, DK - Hotel Cecil
  Wednesday 6th December - Stockholm, SE - Slaktkyrkan
  
  Tickets available from forestswords.co.uk.

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☟ Forest Swords Internet Presence ☟
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📣 LAZY INTERVIEW #33 — E.M.M.A

October saw the release of 'Mindmaze', a track by London-based producer and DJ E.M.M.A. It's an unexpected cocktail of two colliding eras of dance: courtly, medieval, harpischord-based whimsy of the past vs. the electronic beats and high-energy of sweaty dancehall. The tract of lutes 'n' flutes that appeared in the track was lifted from Mindmaze, a dungeon crawler-slash-educational quiz featured on childhood-forming Encarta '95. Why Mindmaze though? "God knows to be honest," the producer speaks to us via email. "I made it in 2014, I can remember sitting down and thinking this Mindmaze theme would sound great as a UK funky type beat, but I can't remember why Mindmaze popped into my consciousness 20 years after the fact. It was just something I vividly remember engaging with as a child."

Perhaps it is the polyphonic complexity of baroque music, fugues and counterpoints – something that finds its way into things like videogame soundtracks, and only fractionally in underground, internet morsels and dance music – which simply sounds good against a beat that no Renaissance composer could have imagined. Indeed it's not E.M.M.A's first scrape with utilising the centuries-old form. "Some of my melodies – particularly on [her 2013 album] Blue Gardens – turned out to be baroque and I think maybe doing a homage to the most baroque tune I could think of kinda just seemed like a good direction to go in," she explains. "I've always been obsessed with what Encarta 95 provided us with before the world wide web came on the scene. I'm not sure why this ends up influencing my music, but we are where we are."

There is a nostalgia in E.M.M.A's music, too, with the sonic referencing in 'Mindmaze' following tracks like the 2012 'Dream Phone', referring to the '90s boardgame of the same name. She brings the humdrum of childhood memories, TV commercials and PC encyclopedias, storming into the adulthood of our modern age with hard minimal beats.

Alongside her own musicmaking, E.M.M.A founded Producergirls, an initiative encouraging women to get into producing, hoping to address the gender imbalance in the music industry. The free DIY workshops began in early 2016 and, thanks to a recent, successful Kickstarter campaign, will spread outside the current London base to cities across the UK. With this to look forward to in the future, for now the producer takes some time out to navigate the mindmaze of the lazy interview.

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w h o   a r e   y o u ?   w h e r e   a r e   y o u   f r o m ?   w h a t   d o   y o u   d o ?

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I was born in Liverpool and lived near Chester before moving to Brighton and London, where I've been for about 7 years. I produce electronic music and DJ, have an NTS radio show with Aimee Cliff called Angel Food. I started the nationwide Producergirls workshop series with Ikonika, Dexplicit, P Jam and Nightwave to encourage more women to try out electronic music production and to see if we can make the industry more gender balanced. 

h o w   d i d   y o u   s t a r t   c r e a t i n g   m u s i c ?

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My friend Paul showed me FL Studio in around 2007 and was very encouraging of my earliest creations. A few of my friends were producers and I wanted a piece of the action.

h o w   w o u l d   y o u   d e s c r i b e   y o u r   s o u n d ?

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Colourful, whatever the opposite of passive is. Active. I try and make it provoke some sort of dialogue with the listener. Maybe like a musical conversation. In terms of nuts and bolts, it's mostly synth orientated and set in a different imagined world a lot of the time. It varies from track to track.

i s   t h e r e   a   p e r f e c t   t i m e   a n d   p l a c e   f o r   l i s t e n i n g   t o   y o u r   m u s i c ?

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At the risk of sounding like a cliché, the middle of the night I think! That's when I make it. „
I've always been obsessed with what Encarta 95 provided us with before the world wide web came on the scene
” w h a t   i n s p i r e s   y o u   m o s t   w h e n   m a k i n g   a   t r a c k ?

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Nature and our relationship to the universe and different times—past, present and future. But then again it depends on the song. I wrote 'Magna Kanye' because something Kanye said about making music really inspired me at a time when I wasn't really doing much, but Aimee and I decided to start Angel Food. I needed a tune for radio which was reflective of the battles I've had in this game. 

w h a t   i s   y o u r   m o s t   m e m o r a b l e   m u s i c a l   e x p e r i e n c e ?

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When my first 12" came out on Wavey Tones in 2012. My close friends Tom and Letty started the label to release my music. I remember hearing it being mastered in a studio not far from my house at the time and then holding a copy of the test press in my hands. It just made me see London in a completely different way too, and it was when I started to think that I might actually be a real musician. 

w h a t   a r e   y o u r   f a v o u r i t e   t h r e e   s o n g s   a t   t h e   m o m e n t ?

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1. The Horrors – Ghost

♫

2. Nightwave – Limelight 

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3. Xao – Karrakis

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w h o   d o   y o u   m o s t   a d m i r e   i n   t h e   m u s i c   w o r l d ?

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Suzanne Ciani, who I saw at Cafe OTO last week. The OG pioneer of the modular synth.

i n   y o u r   o p i n i o n ,   w h a t   i s   t h e   f u t u r e   o f   m u s i c ?

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In terms of the industry, it's smashing up privilege, dismantling self-interested structures, opening up access and reclaiming the art from the gatekeepers so that the industry is what it should be: welcoming to all, with skills shared for free.

w h a t ' s   t h e   f u t u r e   o f   y o u r   m u s i c   –   w h a t   d o   y o u   h o p e   t o   d o   n e x t ?

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I'm working on another album.

w h a t   i s   m o s t   i m p o r t a n t   t o   y o u ?

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Peace.


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• 🔔 Feel free to purchase E.M.M.A's's Mindmaze / Pumpkin Emoji 12", out now physically and digitally courtesy of Coyote Records. Various options for purchase are available via this exact hyperlink.

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L  A  Z  Y    I N T E R V I E W    S E R I E S

← #32: IGLOOGHOST #34: ??????? →

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🐣 ELMARI X GREG WANDERS X MUDCHUTE — WHATEVER [初演 • PREMIERE]

The feeling of romance sweeps through this track like a, like a bank of clouds making their gradual way across a sun-filled deep blue sky, present and washing over you in swathes of delicious textures and soulful nuances. Clonking chimes summon this glorious naive love, a certain innocence in their gleaming golden chords, each resounding with canyons of space between, the moments drawn out lusciously like the longing between liaisons with a lover, not lust exactly but lovesickness, a deep crush, the beat slow and swaying, the atmosphere sultry yet fresh. Greg Wanders, who is behind the vocals on this collaborative track, was inspired by that feeling.

"I listened to it a couple times and the general vibe was something I could imagine listening to with that special someone," he tells us, "so I decided to direct my energy towards that field." He croons accordingly with a feeling of gentle detachment, floating above the world, heart fluttering, suiting the almost sleepy vibe in the instrumental.

'Whatever' also features fellow Londoner, producer ElMari, as well as Liverpool-based musicmaker Mudchute, and was the product, as ElMari wrote to us in an email, of a meeting between the three artists in London in the summer: "We got in the studio one day in September and we vibed and then we made this." The rhythm, the space, and the textures of this track combine beautifully together, the space hanging between sounds bristling with energy and strewn with muttering vocal samples and fizzy sounds. Lounge-flavoured synth chords paint a sense of utter chillment, the slow nodding motion of them bouncing along with the warm bass bloops, the percussion keeping time with a crunch of snare and gloopy kicks. And let us not forget that guitar, adding an instant heat to the track with its muffled but scorching virtuosity.

Part lullaby, part slow jam, 'Whatever' is a dreamy, brightly glistening send-off into the arms of a fellow human being who wants to spend a large portion of their time with you.

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☟ ElMari Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Greg Wanders Internet Presence ☟
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☟ Mudchute Internet Presence ☟
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FOREST SWORDS THE WEIGHT OF GOLD

Over a month ago we heard the fabuloso 'Thor's Stone' by the rather esoteric Forest Swords, a song beset by wild bamboo flutes with more than a little what's-in-the-woods-? mystique about it. Today we have more delights from this experimental British artist, whose music conjures foggy marshlands or murky forests where clusters of ghost lights float panicked ahead of something truly strange and unknown in the unseen depths of nature, in the very trees themselves, in the water, in the air. The grass is cold and wet. The paths are muddy. Britain is an ancient forest swimming in bogs. Huge angry clouds crouch over the land forever.

That's the kind of vibe you get from past songs and also their latest tracks - and the delight I was speaking of today, 'The Weight Of Gold' plays up to the heaviness implied by its title. And it certainly doesn't skimp on the brutal mysticism that seems to emanate from this sound like curling smoke. It's there all the time, hanging in the air. Hear fo yoself.

The song announces itself as an existence in and of itself with distorted horns, the atmosphere conjured with plucked overdriven stringed-something-or-other and scuttling percussion that is both huge and raw. It pounds away, clacking woodblocks against dull-yet-explosive taiko-sounding drums. Sub-bass creeps in from somewhere, giving a nonchalant groove to a wholly non-nonchalant sound. Beginning at the final third of the song, the high-pitched strings play a cyclical melody, summoning the final push that seems to burst forth from the very earth itself, scraping and distorted completely unintelligible/inhuman vocals that reverb and echo as if travelling through twisted jagged caves to get to your ears.

That beat. Wow. It kills your ears but it's kinda gloriously satisfying, that thud of a drum booming, sounding closer to your heart than something more electro-based. It's a tatty kind of sound, rough-around-the-edges, like the kind of paper you'd stain with tea, crumple up, rub with dirt and burn holes in when you were younger to make a treasure map. It's faux-mystic, of course, cause you can't very well record true sounds of unearthly things, but you can whisk your imagination away to a landscape that shudders heavy with meaning and magic.

This is the second song to come from Forest Swords' upcoming DEBUT ALBUM Engravings out 26th August on Tri Angle records.

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FOREST SWORDS THOR'S STONE

Well well well. Well well well well well. I never knew that I would hear anything more from Forest Swords ever since I first stumbled upon their minimalist reverb-guitared sparse and tribal nocturnal soundtracks to various spooky landscapes. Why? I think because it was so strange that they would most likely stay obscure. It seemed, by their very sound, that they wanted to stay obscure. I keep saying "they", but I really don't know the number of people involved in Forest Swords. Cool name though eh? All I know is that they come from the Wirral (peninsula in north west England) and Liverpool - maybe there's more than one person after all.

But! Obviously! They're here. On their SoundCloud there is a two year gap between the first song they added, 'Miarches' - the kind of sound that I described above, creeping and hidden - and their newest song 'Thor's Stone'. Now, those two years have definitely made a difference because now there is a very big difference in sound. There is more layering, more production, more texture. Take a listen or have a listen or in some way get the sound of this song into your ears.

What is still there in the sound of Forest Swords is the spooky quality, a dark vibe that seems to have matured over time from something hidden into something now in full view. With deep, near-foghorn bass and light drums the song grinds along, introducing different layers over its duration, tinkering hi-hats and barely-noticeable high-pitch noises. Around halfway through, a wooden flute of some sort takes centre stage (could be a shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute), sounding very cool in the stillness between the drums. That part is downright dirty - durty even.

Stabs of sound crash, the hi-hats roll, the beat grows and a snare smash gives itself to the noise of the song. Bright and frantic vocal samples rise up towards the end, culminating in a turntably reversal of sound. It is experimental in essence, and something that by the very nature of the nomenclature, with things like "Forest" and "Thor's Stone", seems to actually be quite close to nature, or at least, perhaps, to an unseen, occultist part of nature that has yet to be set to music. Well, until now. And the only drawback - and indeed the only bridge to realising that sound - is imagination. Forest Swords definitely seem to have a lot of that.

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Listen to Forest Swords on Soundcloud
Visit Forest Swords' official site
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