Fang, Forrest

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2019
The ambient music of Ancient Machines — the eighteenth album from veteran Bay Area electronic musician and multi-instrumentalist Forrest Fang — embraces an arc of mysteriously complex moods and emotions. Fang’s latest work reflects both his Western influences as a classical violinist and his Eastern influences as a player of Javanese gamelan and other Asian instruments. The pieces are imaginary narratives that gradually reveal themselves, incorporating the sounds of both electronic and acoustic instruments.
 

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2012
Multi-instrumentalist / electronic composer Forrest Fang has been creating his powerful blend of world instrument East-West-influenced sound art for over three decades. The pieces have the elegance and grace of "serious" composed music but the overarching feeling is pure, all-organic, and very human at the core. On his latest, ANIMISM, a long list of acoustic instruments and some synths are brought into play. The thick harmonic stew is created from a deep and heady slow boil of acoustic and electronic sources, treated with extreme audio processing, finding a shared cellular bond after what feels like a long marinade in deep reverberating spaces. Highly recommended!
Fang creates a diverse musical style that fuses timeless Fourth World acoustic instruments with a modern fractal ambient sound. Inspired by the belief that all living forms possess a spirit or life force. Digipak.

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 1995
Forrest Fang is in top form on this album, creating a haunting, mesmerizing "ancient" Eastern sound blended with the modern compositional techniques of the "ethno-ambient" genre using strings, winds, various percussion, and electronics. Similar in feel to his masterpiece "The Wolf at the Ruins" (soon to be re-released). Robert Rich and Steve Roach join Forrest on "Folklore", adding their flavor to an already rich mix of both beautiful Eastern melodies (particularly "Falling Stones") and earthy ambient textures.
Forrest combines influences and instruments of many lands together with a modern esthestic and electronic instruments. Forrest plays violin, sampler, and instruments from Bali, Botswana, China, India, Java, Kenya, Mexico, Mongolia, Syria and Thailand. His music is neither traditional nor "world music", but a personal mixture of influences instrumentation.
Forrest Fang is a veteran ambient musician. Folklore is one of his landmark releases. That term ­ "landmark release" ­ is used frequently to describe Fang's releases. He has four or five releases and they are all landmarks of some sort or another. His signature style is to blend the folk music of his Chinese heritage with modern and electronic ambience. He combines traditional ethnic instruments with modern electronic instruments and techniques.
The results are very deliberate and intricate atmospheres, some with edges and some smooth. Fang defines several moods with his melodies. His soundscapes are always descriptive. This is unique ambience. It compares favorably to the music of Thom Brennan, Blasdel & Uehara, and Stephan Baer.

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2021
LTD 300
Fang has taken his time to create something memorable. Forever Cascades is the rare ambient work that is optimistic without being maudlin, without succumbing to the upbeat clichés that have given New Age music a bad name. The textures here are classic Fang, with ethereal atmospheres grounded in ethnic percussion. Well worth the wait.
For fans of: electronic, ambient & fourth-world soundscapes.
Composer and recording artist Forrest Fang refined his dynamic hybrid style of composition over the past four decades, expanding upon his roots in progressive music, minimalism, textural ambient, and the traditional musics of Asia. Drawing on his deep knowledge of sound creation and manipulation, he uses the studio like a separate instrument to create distinctive, alluring and otherworldly atmospheres. With captivating approaches to sound creation, his latest Projekt album FOREVER CASCADES presents a series of intricately-layered sonic vignettes and impressionistic soundscapes inspired by shoreline walks over the last year.
“Though my walks near the San Francisco Bay were initially a way for me to clear my head,” says Fang, “I also found myself drawn to the cycles and cadences of tides and aquatic life that shifted gradually from season to season. I was seeking a similar underlying cadence or pulse in these pieces that would evolve over time.”

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2000
On this work, he continues his forays into ethno-ambient, here with his usual plethora of world music influences, including balalaika, Japanese palm harp, and Indonesian gamelan music, among others. These are all fused with keyboard electronics, which themselves span a wide range of sounds that fully complement the native instruments. Fang is particularly interested in how algorithms can be derived in electronic music--patterns that can be used to generate new patterns. This is a strong release, and should be heard by anyone interested in where world fusion is going these days.

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2009
Nearly eight years in the making, Phantoms builds on soundscapes by weaving organic sounds of non-Western stringed and percussion instruments and filtering those sounds through a rich melodic tapestry of warm and vaporous atmospheres. Fang’s subtly layered and continually evolving textures combine his Asian influences with his love of fractal algorithms that reflect the chaotic beauty of nature. The ambiences of Phantoms evoke a state of contemplation within a world in flux. The centerpiece of the album is a 23-minute ambient suite — “The Hallucinations of Hung Tung” — inspired by the otherworldly paintings of a Taiwanese fisherman and outsider artist. A very fine release full of great in-depth atmospheres that any fan of Robert Rich, David Parsons or Steve Roach should absorb.

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2020
LTD 300
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 em- bodies 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 star- gazing. 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.”

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2019
Over the course of seventeen solo albums and three-plus decades, Bay-area ambient/electronic musician Forrest Fang has cultivated his surrealist blend of electronically-transformed ethnic instruments and minimalist aural environments. Fang’s pieces reflect his uniquely personal universe of influences, mysterious objects and undefined phenomena. Gently layered drones combine with slow-moving piano themes, violin, as well as subtle Eastern string, wind, and percussive elements.A ‘Fata Morgana’ is a special form of mirage that makes objects appear to float in air. On Fang’s latest Projekt album, The Fata Morgana Dream, his sonic world suspends time with accents and undertones that seemingly emerge from the subconscious.For this album,” Fang reflects, “I created a series of atmospheric pieces that are connected by a nocturnal and free-floating spirit that allows different instruments, treatments and effects to interact in a malleable space. The overall mood comes from somewhere between sleep and wakefulness where the familiar might reappear in an unfamiliar way because of the dreamlike state.”he album begins with “The Mouth of the Ocean,” a layered and subtly-textured piece with strings and echoing electronic tones marking the commencement of a colorful journey. A visit to the dense tropical landscape of “Matted Leaves” follows, leading the listener to a “Night Procession” of gamelan-flavored polyrhythms that are accompanied by looping violins. Two contemplative keyboard-based pieces follow — “Her Fading Image” and “Lullaby for a Twin Moon” — that are complemented by Fang’s electronic clouds suspended in the realm of thought. The next piece, “Remembrance Point,” is a highlight of the album with its echoing piano riding just above a bed of electronic strings. The album makes a gradual and gentle return with its final two pieces. “Dream of the Last Fisherman” features Fang’s Balinese and Burmese gongs and a Japanese Palm Harp, while “To the End and Back” features his violin, a sea of overlapping synthesizer drones and a small, resonating sound sculpture (built by visionary designer Harry Bertoia) that Fang strokes with his fingers. 

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2022
LTD 500
THE LOST SEASONS OF AMORPHIA is a classic Fang release. Its ethereal atmospheres are grounded in primal Asian instruments that seek balance in the sometimes unpredictable darkness and light of our interior seasons. 

Artists: Forrest Fang
P: 2023
The Oort Cloud is a vast spherical hull of ice proposed to reside on the outer rim of our solar system. Nothing in this cloud has yet been seen, though it may contain icy objects including comets once close to the sun. This imagined place is the inspiration for ambient musician Forrest Fang’s The Oort Cloud Meditations. While many of Fang’s releases are a hybrid of electronic and acoustic instruments, his latest remains predominantly a free-floating, transparent and gently unfolding electronic space. Using synthesizers to a greater extent than on previous albums, Fang organically transforms their tones into undulating harmonic gestures through ambient treatments and processing. The five far-reaching movements proceed at a relaxed pace; drifting atmospheres ebb and expand gradually, encouraging the mind to wander untethered.
“I created this album over an intense three months,” says Fang. “It started with a simple experiment that continued to evolve and spilled over into new pieces as the results grew more interesting and more sonically complex. I created electronic sounds that revolved around each other semi-randomly with room for harmonies to develop organically from these interactions. I used melodies sparingly, subtly introducing alternate tunings at times to reflect different moods.”
The album opens with “Planetary Hum,” a gently rolling series of tones intended to ground the listener for the auditory meditations to follow. The work’s open-ended textures are at times reminiscent of Brian Eno’s generative soundscapes but more dynamic in nature. The extended “Diaphanes” follows, thematically drawing on the translucence of ice and revealing a surprisingly warm sonic environment. Like the opener, the overall mood is elongated and expansive. Across eighteen otherworldly minutes, the electronic textures glow and flicker suggesting arcs of the sun’s refracted light.
A darker, more mysterious blend of hues appears on “The Lighthouse.” Fragmentary themes quietly appear and recede in the veiled fog like random memories briefly emerging from the subconscious. Long, expanding echoes trail the melodic fragments leaving a large spatial void that ultimately swallows up these ephemeral reverberations. Even so, the fragments cover a considerable distance before finally fading away.
The faint trail from “The Lighthouse” leads us to the calming spaces of “Distant Signals.” Resonating frequencies resembling the sustain and decay of bronze temple bells and gongs drift across the acoustic field in tunings suggesting ancient origins. An unearthly choral sound bed gradually emerges, bringing the listener into an imaginary floating realm of undefined dimension.
Our visit to the Oort Cloud concludes with a return from distant celestial skies to internal spaces in the final piece, “Solus.” A cluster of thick harmonious tones form their own vibrating cloud; it momentarily hangs in the air before receding into silence.