Forest Swords: 'Engravings' / Millie & Andrea: 'Drop The Vowels'

I’ve never wanted to overload this blog with music-related posts, but as with cinema, books, etc., listening to music remains intrinsic to how I relate to the world.  It’s certainly a fairly constant accompaniment to my own creative endeavours and must find its way into work, if only subconsciously.  Actually, it’s often quite conscious too, as I’ve noticed I regularly use musical analogies when considering paintings, and indeed, vice-versa.  Disclaimer over.

Context:

We’re far enough away in time from the high water mark of Dubstep for the music made in its backwash to coalesce into a whole new set of identifiable tropes.  Inevitably, as soon as they have emerged, journalists rush to apply new genre labels to them.  I try to avoid thinking too rigidly in such terms, persuading myself I’m more interested in judging each offering on its own musical merits.  It often seems that as soon as a musical meme becomes established and categorised, it also starts to parody itself with ever-diminishing returns.

Demdike Stare: Miles Whittaker (L), Sean Canty (R).

Nevertheless, there have been some common influences or a certain shared aesthetic knocking around for a while, whose main features would include an distinct sense of foreboding and the conjunction of a clotted Dub sensibility with the kind of sound design often employed by composers of horror movie soundtracks.  Actually, much of this would appear a fairly logical extension of classic Dubstep’s fixation with what lurks in urban shadows.  Beats still prevail in much of this dark, bass-heavy sound sculpture, but dancing is definitely secondary to the creation of a forbidding, even occult, atmosphere, (much is just far too slow, for a start).

I’d be lying if I claimed I haven’t used my discovery of a particular artist/record to act as a gateway to other others whose names drop from online reviews or genre surveys.  This sense of a ‘scene’ is further fortified by the fact that artists such as The Haxan Cloak, Demdike Stare, Vessel, Raime, et al, have reached an audience via the Tri Angle and Modern Love labels.  The output of Sam Shackleton’s Skull Disco label, and his own attempts to push the genre into new shapes and greater conceptual complexity, could also be seen as antecedents, for those looking to join the dots over recent years.

Vessel, 'Order Of Noise', Tri Angle Records, 2012.

To be honest, I can take or leave some of the more pantomimic gothic trappings often attached to some of this music.  Much as I admire the dread-laden (in both senses) soundscapes of many current gloom-mongers, I am slightly disquieted by the presence of just one too many references to the Pendle Witches, or incidences of blacker-than-black cover artwork.  All is usually well whilst Post Modernist detachment is maintained, but I always fear the moment someone chooses to play live with robes and a pentagram backdrop.  Either way, it was with some pleasure that I encountered the releases discussed below.  Both can be certainly viewed as reflecting the same overall zeitgeist as many of the above, but both transcend the expected by augmenting an increasingly familiar sonic palette with new sounds, or re-engineering the rhythmic structures often associated with it.

Forest Swords, ‘Engravings’:

Forest Swords, 'Engravings'.

Forest Swords is the alter ego of Wirral-based producer and graphic designer, Matthew Barnes.  Released in 2013, ‘Engravings’ [1.] was his first full-length album release, but was actually a development of the sound he prototyped on his, admittedly lengthy ‘Dagger Paths’ EP in 2010 [2.].  This one surprised and impressed me immediately, and I’m clearly not alone, judging by the widespread critical acclaim greeting its release.

Forest Swords/Matthew Barnes.

The real source of its startling, individual impact might be summed up in one word, - ‘guitar’.  Barnes draws on a wide enough range of typical components to create his overall sound, including Dub, Hip Hop, film music, heavily treated vocals, orchestral strings and much else beside.  These are stitched together, (with the joins often showing), into multi-faceted, melodramatic forms which repay repeated listening.  However, it’s the distorted, twanging, guitar riffs running through it all, that really set his music apart from anything else in the same field.  It’s hard to ignore suggestions of Spaghetti Westerns or American desert music in this.  However, there’s an equally powerful Oriental flavour there too, - both in some of this guitar phrases, and in those massed strings that often rise to the surface.

Forest Swords, 'Dagger Paths EP'.

Much as enjoy ‘Dagger Paths’, there is the suspicion of a good idea repeated once too often.  I find it hard to stay focused for the duration on something that eventually starts to feel a bit one-dimensional.  Rather than backing off on ‘Engravings’, Barnes solved this problem by opening up more breathing space between the different events in each piece, varying the mood and narrative implications between tracks, and tempering that trademark guitar sound with a much wider vocabulary of other instrumental sounds.  Many of these pieces unfold through several gear changes, with varying degrees of light and shade, and there’s a definite sense of progression in most of them.

Forest Swords/Matthew Barnes.

I’m guessing that much is sampled, but it’s impressive just how coherent each track becomes in its overall ambience.  The main key to this is hardly a secret.  As with everything that ultimately derives from the Jamaican Dub pioneers, each disparate element is so drenched in reverb that it simply locates itself, almost physically within the resulting cavernous space.  Barnes’ other main production trick is the extensive and judicious use of distortion, - particularly when applied to vocals.  There are many parallels to be drawn between ‘Engravings’ and the work of Burial, but whereas the latter often litters his tracks with intriguing, audible phases, Forest Swords distorts everything into almost total abstraction.  The human voice becomes just another sound source, and there’s hardly a word or phrase I can actually decipher, (although that could just be my ears of course).

A marvelous example of all this would be the track, ‘Irby Tremor’.  It opens with what sounds like distinctly foreign incidental music coming from a distorted TV speaker in the next room, before moving into a highly distinctive main theme in which crisp Reggae-derived high hats combine with a sonorous, rolling guitar riff.  This is then re-punctuated by more incongruous sounding strings and flutes and the suggestion of a distant, soulful vocal.  In just over four minutes, the track creates a deeply cinematic sound world in which one might construct any number of imaginary but non-specific narratives.  It’s all achieved by the simple expedient of conjoining several unrelated elements, immersing them in humid atmospherics, and hanging them off a killer rhythm pattern.

Forest Swords

It’s a stunt that Barnes pulls off repeatedly on ‘Engravings’.  I suspect it’s that ability to find something new each time that has drawn me back to ‘Engravings’ repeatedly in recent weeks.

Millie & Andrea, ‘Drop The Vowels’:

‘Killer rhythm patterns’, seems to be absolutely what ‘Drop The Vowels’ [3.] is about.  Indeed, it often focuses on relatively little else.

Millie & Andrea is the name adopted by part-time collaborators Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott.  Whittaker is one half of the highly rated dark soundscape project, Demdike Stare, (with Sean Canty), also working under the names Miles, Mlz and with Stott and GH as Hate.  Stott himself is best known for a series of Techno-related releases under his own name.  His trademark sound involves a scuzzy, claustrophobic take on the form normally labelled Dub Techno, developed to incorporate elegant female vocals on the standout album, ‘Luxury Problems’ [4.].

Millie/Miles Whittaker (L.) & Andrea/Andy Stott (R).

They’re clearly busy boys and, whilst I haven’t heard all their stuff, can happily recommend those bits I have.  The Millie & Andrea project itself seems to be an attempt to produce something les serious or conceptually overburdened.  In fact, ‘Drop The Vowels ‘ actually reimagines and augments some previously released material but hangs together very well as an album.  It also dwells in the shadows, far more than in the light, despite any claims of uncomplicated hedonism.

Andy Stott.

After a brief intro of tribal chanting, the album sets its stall out early with ‘Gif Riff’, a track that effectively sounds like a percussion group let loose on the pipework and industrial plant of an echoing, abandoned factory building.  There follows a sequence of tracks that draw from the rhythmic blueprints of various contemporary sub genres, (such as Trap and Footwork, with which, I admit, I’m relatively unacquainted), but also look further back to a heavy Junglist aesthetic.  Cutting edge scenesters may scoff that this is old news, but I never claimed to be one of them.  To me, it comes as something of a refreshing change.  I derived much pleasure from Drum & Bass music in its 1990s heyday, and it’s a pleasure to hear someone pick up the pace again after years of relatively stately time signatures.

Miles Whittaker.

Whilst not without its subtleties, ‘Drop The Vowels’ is definitely one for those who enjoy a good pummeling from time to time.  ‘Temper Tantrum’ and ‘Spectral Source’ both focus steadfastly on beats, leavened by only minimal harmonic elements.  ‘Stay Ugly’ features a typical Stottian Bassline, sunk in heavily corroded murk, over which it posits clattering, metallic beats and an implied organ melody from which half the notes appear to have been lost.  That whole track is sufficiently mired in distortion to have me regularly checking my amp for dust and speaker cones for damage.  Meanwhile, the album’s central passage is lost in deep jungle.  ‘Corrosive’ starts a bit worryingly with snares, ticking high hats and bubbling synths, but then just turns plain nasty with clumsily sequenced jungle beats best described as brutal.

Should all this aggressive chunkiness prove too exhausting, Stott and Whittaker allow their album’s latter stages to gradually recede into the kind of cinematic atmospherics often associated with the latter’s Demdike output.  The final track, ‘Quay’, is an affecting exercise in dark ambience, textured with static interference and punctuated by thuds and metallic clanking.  If, like many of their contemporaries, Stott and Whittaker seem intent on making recreational music for a collapsing society, that last track might suggest waking on the first morning after the lights went out and the dust settled.

Conclusion:

Maybe, in the end, that’s the key to all this sombre electronica.  The socially and politically nightmarish late 1970s and 1980s spawned Industrial music and Gothic Rock.  Perhaps then, the current emphasis on musical gloom, occasionally woven through with strands of the eldritch or Pagan, is both a reflection of, and simultaneous escape from, the insecurity and tensions of these current dark times.

[1.]:  Forest Swords, ‘Engravings’, Tri Angle Records, 2013.

[2.]:  Forest Swords, ‘Dagger Paths EP (Expanded Edition)’, No Pain In Pop, 2010.

[3.]:  Millie & Andrea, ‘Drop The Vowels’, Modern Love, 2014.

[4.]:  Andy Stott, 'Luxury Problems', Modern Love, 2012.