Forrest Fang - The Book of Wanderers '2020

Tracks list

THE BOOK OF WANDERERS, the new album from Projekt ambient musician Forrest Fang,
creates an auditory escape, an aspiration towards venturing outwards, imagining
better times ahead. Direct and emotional, the collection of electronic tone
poems was recorded primarily during the spring and summer 2020 coronavirus
lockdown. “While confined to my home in the Bay Area,” says Fang,
“I felt the need to create pieces that provided virtual spaces for my mind
to wander. These idealized spaces became my inner world during this time.”

The album begins with “An Atom on a Long Chain,” an ambitious and
lively piece featuring echoing piano, hypnotic string sounds, and interlocking
rhythms derived partly from fractals. The mood shifts with the atmospheric
“Song of the Wanderer,” in which a gamelan gong and an electric
piano share space with misty synthesized and processed textures. The sustained
mood continues with “Tale of the Egret,” which features special
guest artist Robert Rich who plays flutes over a relaxed backdrop of treated
percussive sounds and a celestial zither.

“Astir,” a quiet interlude for piano and strings, provides a
transition to “Atlantis,” an extended soundscape of shimmering
strings, piano, Mellotron, and gamelan that perhaps best embodies the
album’s theme of utopian worlds. An intriguing Fourth World-style track,
“Elephant Steps,” follows, combining its tribal rhythms with
hammered strings and sustained choral voices.

A shift into the spatial realm of pure electronic music occurs on the next
track, “Chasing Stars.” The expansive sound fields and distant
reverberations of this piece evoke the beauty of stargazing. We then return to
terra firma on “From the Hollows,” a textural piece Fang had
originally intended as a belated birthday tribute to ambient musician Brian Eno.

Another short interlude, “Water Pod,” provides a playful transition
into THE BOOK OF WANDERERS’ final piece, “Kepler’s
Return,” in which otherworldly electronic and choral drones converge into
a harmonious universe suggested in 17th-Century astronomer Johannes
Kepler’s “music of the spheres.”

Tracklisting:
01. Forrest Fang - An Atom on a Long Chain (9:09)
02. Forrest Fang - Song of the Wanderer (5:55)
03. Forrest Fang - Tale of the Egret (8:06)
04. Forrest Fang - Astir (4:01)
05. Forrest Fang - Atlantis (12:45)
06. Forrest Fang - Elephant Steps (6:25)
07. Forrest Fang - Chasing Stars (5:48)
08. Forrest Fang - From the Hollows (8:28)
09. Forrest Fang - Water Pod (4:23)
10. Forrest Fang - Keplers Return (6:21)

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