Forrest Fang - The Sleepwalker's Ocean (CD)

Release Date: 01/22/16

Hypnotic deep-ambient explorations of the fantastical and elusive realm of the subconscious.

Fang’s 2015The Sleepwalker’s Oceanis his only 2CD studio album. The first edition quickly sold out, in 2021 Projekt released this 2nd edition. It’s a hypnotic deep-ambient exploration of the fantastical and elusive realm of the subconscious. Fang gives free reign to his intuitive and instinctual side allowing the sonic landscape to drift into his interior world of elusive and impressionistic thoughts and images.

Textura: “Forrest Fang distinguishes himself from his contemporaries… with a rich instrumental presentation and by integrating into his work elements associated with gamelan music and other Eastern musical forms.”

While Fang embraces the American minimalists and the ambient soundscapes of his contemporaries, he also draws on the gentle percussive textures of gamelan and on pentatonic scales used in traditional Asian music. Using violin, electric mandolin, electric guitar, keyboards and various textural treatments to create complex layers of sound, Fang also plays lesser-known instruments such as Marxolin, saron (Javanese gamelan), and lavta (Turkish lute). Robert Rich contributes his otherworldly flutes to “Message In The Sand.”

“To me,” Fang says, “the ocean is not only a symbol of emptiness and space, but also one of unknown depth and mystery. It is much like a dream that seems so real and vast yet is formless because it originates in the mind. For this release, I took a more open-ended approach, allowing in more spontaneous sonic ‘accidents’ and textures. The layered soundscape of my ‘ocean,’ populated with these accidental characters, ebbs and flows in a vast imaginary sonambulent space.”

The album’s second disc is a single long-form electronic track, “An Alternate Ocean (The Salton Sea).” It’s a 54-minute alternative view of the imaginary ocean: more sustained and celestial than its cousin with an inward focus and a hint of Asian influence that brings the album to a state of quiet repose.

2CD in 4-panel ecoWallet