Forest Swords - Compassion

The Quietus

The music of Matt Barnes (aka Forest Swords) has become increasingly panoramic and elegiac since his 2013 debut Engravings. Despite having allusions to internet aesthetics, the real power to Barnes’ work always came from the organic and unheimlich links to his native Wirral, a place where offshore windfarm sentinels guard a peninsula, where urban decay and industrial estates squash against rural pastures and long meandering coastal paths to nowhere.

For Barnes’ second album, Compassion, there is a continuing refinement of the Forest Swords sound. With a mix of dub pressure, spidery guitars, loping beats, and abstract and atomised vocal samples that range from old school soul singers to church choirs, there is a crackling, mossy layer and a foggy pallor of melancholia over the music. It's an updated retelling based on scraps of ancient and forbidding hymnic rituals.

But Compassion sees Barnes aiming higher as he goes full-on symphonic, using a full orchestra as a weapon in his sampladelic arsenal. The simpler guitar arrangements from previous releases are mostly replaced by bright string sections and the dusky drones and burrs of organs and brass. This deeper sound palate is chopped and screwed by Barnes to create a grander, sweeping dynamism as the remnants and ghostly tides of orchestral sound rise and fall against clattering beats. Tracks such as opener 'War It' and 'Border Margin Barrier' recall the melancholy of Johann Jóhansson’s elegy to the mining communities of northeast England in The Miners' Hymns. The highly symphonic nature of a track such as 'Vandalism', with its processed electronics, delicate chimes, and swelling strings and brass are more in line with the wealth of 'neo-classical' soundtrack work that wouldn’t be far out of place on a high-end TV crime drama based in the frozen north.

In laying out a mood that’s constantly sombre and confined, there seems to be an overwhelming emotional pressure throughout Compassion, whether it be the symbolic album art of a man attempting to hold up a stone above his body, the liberal amounts of low frequency in the mix, or the idea mentioned by Barnes in the press notes that during the making of this album he “struggled to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel”. This point is hammered home In 'Panic' with a sample of a singer belting out “I feel something’s wrong/The panic is on”. Compassion ruminates on a generalised and deepening malaise in our everyday lives, where the sources for our unhappiness and stress tend to be multiple and varied. We can feel the pressure but we can’t pinpoint a single cause.

Despite this, Barnes does seek some form of intrinsic beauty in the hopelessness and entrenched cynicism. 'Arms Out' attempts to bring a sense of lightness and joy, with shards of light brass cutting through the fug. Then you have a track such as 'Raw Language' where Barnes adds martial rhythms and melodic grime tuffness to choral vocal samples, organs and distorted sax lines.

Compassion is slightly less impenetrable and esoteric than Barnes' other albums, its emotions slightly more telegraphed. But it loses none of his power to enthral, disturb and enthuse. With a series of accompanying multidisciplinary projects linked to his Dense Truth label, such as soundtracks to the dance piece Shrine, the video game Assassin’s Creed and a film shot entirely with drones, Compassion has Barnes taking his musical vision outside of his own head and out into the world around him.

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Tue Jun 27 10:31:49 GMT 2017

Avant Music News

Wed Aug 17 11:07:00 GMT 2022

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Forest Swords
Compassion

[Ninja Tune; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

We’re all good people here, right? We would all upright an overturned tortoise on the side of the road, but would you succor blind Bartimaeus? When the orphans of Jerusalem ask for bread, would you break it unto them? When your promised enemy collapses in the heat, would you carry water to his lips? Are you content, tuned into the jeremiad of nightly news? Doesn’t mean we’re bad, just human.

I think of everything I have done out of spite, of every time I wielded contempt as a cudgel. Worse, perhaps, a retreat to the hardness of my days, a stony construction designed to wall-in all empathy. Not even the keening of widows outside my windows breaks through. I am not an evil person, but I am myself and they are themselves. I can find myself in any book in my library, and when the shrill, burning grind of their nails against my battlements groans through, I often try:

“A well-meaning man is one who often does a great deal of mischief without any kind of malice. He means no one any harm, if it is not for his interest. He is not a knave, nor perfectly honest. He does not easily resign a good place.”

Should we suffer together? The question might be one of capability. Breathe in and breathe out, synchronize. Thread a filament from my heart to yours. Let my blood spill in place of yours.

We find a central problem in the circulation of images. It was sometime, a while ago, when the sluice was opened, but we’re still unaccustomed to the torrent. We are fatigued by images, our sentimental organs have run themselves to failure. Empathy has ruined empathy, compassion numbed compassion.

Each new war — no more or less shocking than the last — competes with each new tragedy — as impossible to predict or prevent as the last — competes with each new outrage — equally pointless as all the rest. Violence has invaded our common vocabulary. Mutilation and death have been transformed into tropes. Our visual and auditory language is overrun with metaphors of harm and violation. The ancient Greeks might have termed ours a hubristic lexicon.

She tells us, “There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.” The world is constituted as representation; we have only images of each other to sort, juxtapose, caption, misinterpret, corrupt, and recirculate. I can never occupy the same space as you. The needle that pierces your flesh will never remark upon my skin.

Can we suffer together? Can we make nourishment out of air? As long as we remain content in our simulations of suffering — I feel for you, I really do — we can mask ourselves in innocence and impotence, deny any part in the wrongdoing inflicted on so many, so near, and so far. That little pang is a voucher to be exchanged. I open my newspaper, a piece about photographs and about the dead, and read:

We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type. […] Each of these little names that the printer struck off so lightly last night, whistling over his work, and that we speak with a clip of the tongue, represents a bleeding, mangled corpse. It is a thunderbolt that will crash into some brain — a dull, dead, remorseless weight that will fall upon some heart, straining it to breaking. […] We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door.

How horrible!


Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, an essay on representations of war and suffering, writes, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Matthew Barnes has decided to confront this challenge as Forest Swords.

Barnes has made his name by the seamlessly blending the seemingly ancient and dusty with the nonspecifically present, melding creaking acoustics with dubby thuds and club-adjacent rhythms. Cracking together freshly excavated Irby hearthstones and sampling grating strings, he throws contemporary electronic music backwards in time, reframing his pieces as pagan rituals out on the Wirral, that same wilderness where Gawain sojourned.

However, his newest work, Compassion, attempts to blur these lines further, to not seem to occupy these two spheres, but to actually confound them. A communique for our strange times, he positions his work as Forest Swords and under the Ninja Tune label, as an ameliorative for the severed synapses of modernity and a way to dispel the superfluity of things.

Prompted by the stunning velocity and circulation of images in the modern world, Barnes has claimed his latest effort seeks to mediate communication and dissolve barriers by establishing fruitful ambiguities. Ancient and modern, wordless and lyrical, honest and ersatz, sacral and profane, all operate as component qualities to be mixed and manipulated, drawn together and apart, so as to create something that resists black-and-white interpretation yet demands something be said about it.

Communication is at the heart of this record, both as a document of sound and as a thing created in reality. Back in March, Barnes distributed music not through a streaming platform, but by asking people to contact him directly by phone, joining incorporeities via the medium of a messenger app. In this instance, the direct connection is secondary to the intermediation, the convolution of exposure, the experience of something as not necessarily real or fake, but instead as an indeterminate communication to be received not in excess of its content.

Barnes’s prior project, a very under-the-radar score for a performance entitled Shrine, made its subject breathe. The force of exhale and the current of inhale were set to dance about each other, rattling loose and wheezy. On Compassion, he similarly deploys voice. Voices are nigh-omnipresent, though they are never clear; aerosolized syllables eddy and accumulate into headless choruses. It’s a language of expression without content, emotive yet underdetermined. Fragments coalesce into a swarm of unknowing, blanketing the surround. “Exalter” is built out of cut-up voices layered and let loose, while “Raw Language” mixes a melancholic sax and wheedling synth line with a host of soaring syllables.

Notably, there is only one line of recognizable language on the entire album. A terse sawing arco mixes with tinkling bells and languorous thud as an impassioned, strained voice calls out in “Panic.” “I feel something’s wrong,” dusty and distant, calls out across the gulf. A canary in the coal mine or a victim of a supersaturated neurosis?

Barnes’s production feels as modernly antiquarian as ever, leaving an impression of middle tones and sepia swathes. Indeed, on Compassion, he seems as indebted to Morricone as his dub forebears. The feathery glitch of “Knife Edge” occupies those same lonesome and grand places as the finest score. Its strident piano and lachrymose strings create a simultaneous sense of isolation and splendor. As “Border Margin Barrier” shows, Barnes is able to incorporate drifting, arrhythmic textures to great effect.

There is something martial, something insistent, to Compassion. True to his aims, Barnes has created something that denies passivity. While it is unlikely to save the world, it might start a conversation, somewhere, between two people who would otherwise never have spoken. It is an attempt, and an honest one at that, to ply art toward an aim and to not rest in detachment. It wears sublimity and austerity yet remains entirely welcoming. There is an earnestness to Barnes’s latest project, a shrugging off of cynicism, and almost even an oxymoronically informed naïveté. Just engage somewhere with someone about something; that’s it, that’s all he’s asking.

Sontag writes of the modern fashion of deafness in the wake of calamity:

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one’s chair far from danger, to claim the position of superiority.

I have the feeling that Sontag would despise our earlier speaker, the cynic lamenting the impossibility of connection. That voice alone in the crowd denying any sort of authentic compassion. But is sincere cynicism really generative? Are bona fide pessimisms the only corrective in a world superabundant with signification? Sontag would certainly say no, and I’m inclined to believe Barnes would join her. He said of Compassion that, at a certain point, he was no longer totally clear on which sounds were “real” and which simulated, but that does not alter at all what the record actually is. It presents itself as anxiety shouldered alongside hope, exultancy in the face of fear, and ardor in the wake of passivity.

To paraphrase a sage: to paraphrase several sages, no one can listen and strike out at the same time.

Thu May 18 04:04:50 GMT 2017

Pitchfork 78

When Forest Swords’ breakthrough EP, Dagger Paths, was released in 2010, the Merseyside, England-based producer born Matthew Barnes was leading a wave of artists fascinated by the darkest and most insular aspects of club music. At the time, Barnes and his contemporaries found an uneasiness lurking beneath pop’s slick veneer. His music, which mixed elements of techno, hip-hop, house, and dub, was a daguerreotype of the dance floor; if there was a rave in the Upside Down dimension on “Stranger Things,” Forest Swords would have made for the perfect soundtrack. Seven years later, that description holds, but Barnes’ vision has grown with each subsequent release, becoming more ambitious and varied while retaining the uncanniness he’s known for.

Compassion, the second proper Forest Swords full-length, focuses more acutely on the music’s organic elements. Percussion clacks and clatters with the sound of actual wood meeting solid resistance; vocal samples, though chopped and deconstructed, resonate more deeply; sweeping arrangements take the listener from claustrophobic drones to world-expanding crescendos. It’s a breadth of sound that Barnes has been building to his whole career as he’s added weight to his music’s skeletal frame. It’s also a relatively predictable direction: Forest Swords’ previous album, Engravings, had already taken much of what made his early music great while dilating and deepening it. In 2017, the Forest Swords of Compassion isn’t entirely a maximalist, but he’s perhaps more similar to Ben Frost than he is to Burial.

Most of Forest Swords’ tracks are wordless, but the human voice is key across Compassion, expressing Barnes themes of state power, technological isolation, and gender dynamics. While the interplay between his inspirations is impressionistic (you have to mine interviews and press materials to explicitly uncover Barnes’ inspirations) the tension created by the music is easy to grasp. Like other electronic producers with a political edge, Forest Swords’ relationship with technology is ambivalent, if not downright hostile. Last year he soundtracked In the Robot Skies, an experimental film made with drones. And perhaps the best track on Compassion is “Panic”; the refrain is unusually clear above its Eastern melody. “I fear something’s wrong/Panic is on,” sings a voice breaking through the static.

But Compassion is often as hopeful as it is paranoid, a first for Barnes. “I’ve struggled to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Barnes has said, reflecting on the political moment. “I realized there’s some sort of power in trying to create our own instead.” The stately “Exalter” is a standout, using clipped samples, rattling percussion, and looped motifs that coalesce in a powerful denouement. By track’s end, it’s as if rays of sunlight have broken through stormy clouds. Compassion also contains hints at the freeform experimentalism of Oren Ambarchi and Ryuichi Sakamoto; “Arms Out” feels like an actual embrace, enveloping the listener in a new age blanket of crystal-clear vocals.

While Forest Swords has always hidden hooks in his music that reveal themselves upon repeat listens, Compassion is by far his most approachable album at first pass. “The Highest Flood” and “Raw Language” use opaque vocal samples that become irresistible earworms, though not the type you’d necessarily sing along to. They recall spirituals, bringing a warmth to even the chilliest synths. “Raw Language” ends with a bright melody somewhere between Pentecostal gospel and occult chant. Time and again, Forest Swords compositions begin fractured and end ecstatic.

Compassion’s cover depicts a man underneath a boulder, doing his best not to be crushed. It’s as if Sisyphus had somehow tripped and gotten himself into an even worse pickle. But in this dire situation, our hero hasn’t given up. Forest Swords music does the same; even as melodies are swallowed by the void, optimism remains. If you’re wondering which side is winning out, just look to the title.

Sat May 06 05:00:00 GMT 2017