< Forrest Fang: The Sleepwalker’s Ocean (2-CD)

Purchase your copy of the limited-edition 2-CD, $17 at the Projekt website. $10 download at Projekt’s Bandcamp store.

Listen to two unreleased songs on Forrest’s Soundcloud page.

Forrest talks about the pieces: I’d like to share these two recent pieces with my listeners as a thank you.  The first piece, “Chimera,” is an outtake from my recordings for the Projekt release, The Sleepwalker’s Ocean.  I left it off the album only because it didn’t seem to fit anywhere.  The piece has elements that were composed at different times and were blended together much later.  The second piece, “Arrow,” is a short experimental piece I recorded recently just for fun.  It incorporates two instruments that date back to my childhood:  a drum with a cardboard frame that my father helped me make in Indian Guides and a pair of maracas given to my family by a visiting exchange student.  I’ve included a picture of them.

The Sleepwalker’s Ocean is a hypnotic deep-ambient exploration through the fantastical, elusive realm of the subconscious. Disc 2 is a first for Fang: a 54-minute electronic landscape that explores an interior world of elusive and impressionistic thoughts and images. Embracing the American minimalists and ambient soundscape artists, Fang blends electronics with acoustic instruments within a framework influenced by traditional Asian music.

Limited edition of 300

A review from Eurock.com Forrest Fang – The Sleepwalkers Ocean Forrest Fang is one of my 35-year long musical heroes. As a student at university, in 1980 he brought me a copy of his very first album composing experiment, Music from the Blackboard Jungle. Since then he has had a career outside the music industry while continuing to peruse his musical dreams releasing a total of 13 albums to date.

His brand new double album is entitled The Sleepwalker’s Ocean, a masterpiece of sonic architecture that combines the deep ebb and flow of electronic earth tones with swirling jet stream sound currents and free-floating celestial melodies. Forest creates intricate sonic textures and timbers using synth/ keyboards & guitar intertwined with exotica – Mandolin/ Marxolin/Saron/Lavta & Cántaro.

The album’s extended five-part title track and the whole of disc two entitled “An Alternate Ocean (The Salton Sea)” contain music that transcends any genre while transporting you to another time and place.

Fifteen years post-millennium we are plunging headlong into the era of diminishing returns. Music production is fast becoming simply a ghost in the machine. You can still buy CDs, but have to pay again to play and promote it on radio. The digital domain has destroyed the spirit of humanity in producing music while filling the coffers of the Tech gods.

The few sacred stores still surviving recycle old musical artifacts and detritus from the present. Fortunately, artists like Forrest Fang have continued their path for decades defying the continuing shift of the zeitgeist making music for art’s sake, stimulating the senses and fortifying the soul. “If music be the food of love, then play on.”

January webstore top-5 Forrest Fang: The Sleepwalker’s Ocean (2-CD) Steve Roach: Emotions Revealed (CD) Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook: Dark Side Of The Moog Vol. 1-4 (5CD Box) (Pre-Order, Mid-Feb) Steve Roach: Vortex 2-Pack Forrest Fang: Phantoms (CD) – 70% Off

We’ve gotten an enthusiastic response to our free downloads. It’s a chance to check out a Projekt album from the catalog that you might not have heard — or one you have on CD that you’re too busy to rip in. Either way! Here’s another great album for you.

Grab your copy, tell friends, spread the word on Facebook and Twitter…

Through Sunday evening (Nov 15), download Lovesliescrushing‘s Voirshn for free on Bandcamp If you want to leave a little donation, that’s cool, but not required.

And if you like Physical Objects, you can buy the CD for $10 at the Projekt webstore.

2002’s Voirshn is a synthesis of processed ambient gloss and lo-fi grit, creating a digital-analog hybrid that Scott terms ‘glitch-bliss’. Songs were compiled from a palette of sonorities extrapolated from a collection of voice and guitars, warped into rumbling subsonics, staticblast hiss, hazy chord clusters, extended infinite tone loops, melody spirals, avian-like whistles, glistening overtones, voices cut-up into splintered fragments, thoughtforms suspended over warm tonesheets like a ghost cloud, indistinct and luminous.

All Music Guide: Nearly ten years on from the spectacular Bloweyelashwish debut, Cortez and singer Melissa Arpin-Henry show once more that the particular magic of the duo is ever present. Cortez has more technical toys to play with this time out, but the basic principle of four-track bedroom recordings translated into stunning post-shoegaze remains. If there’s a bit less of a rough edge on many of the songs, it’s only because Cortez has gotten ever more detailed with the sound.