A complex and disarmingly creative record whose sounds speak of the mystical and the physical in the same airy breath.
Forrest is a project of Warren Kroll (aka Dorosoto), whose previous work has included a split with Moustache Mountain (Anyteazers / Swepstone Songs) and the well-received Summer Sounds Asleep on U-Cover. Beyond the Withered Hills is Forrest’s first solo release on I, Absentee, and builds imaginatively—hauntingly—on the drone textures and ambient landscapes of the earlier Swepstone Songs.
Forrest makes strong, confident use of complexly structured textures and bass-filtered loops to produce echoing, fine-grained tracks which liltingly rove across audible landscapes of troughs and peaks. Both melancholy and euphoria are at work, playing true to the name of “withered hills.” Scarred, arrhythmic textures rise and fall against contrapuntal keys and synths which have a focus in track 4 (“Breathing Shore”), where a powerful key-change underlines the interacting tones and environments at work.
Across the tracks is a sense almost of breathing, the rising and falling of an organic breath punctuated by contrapuntal strings, keys, synths which both draw toward harmony and break away from it. These fundamentally are meditations on landscape, on almost mystical spaces – mist-deep, hazy at their horizons, struck with serrated rock formations and echoing, chiming wind. “Mirrored Meadow” has a sense of ancient time, of texture and complex, unstructured spaces. Its loops of breathing synth and organic drone produce a haunting “Other World” of place, space and time.
Beyond the Withered Hills constructs a haunting environment of both coarse and fine grained ambient textures, a mesh of interacting, slow and filtered loops. High-pass filters and reverb pare away at the bass, leaving a resonant, euphoric breathing of synth and texture, air and earth. It is a complex and disarmingly creative record whose sounds speak of the mystical and the physical in the same airy breath.
Beyond The Withered Hills is available on I, Absentee.
