Forest Robots - Amongst a Landscape of Spiritual Reckoning (2021)

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Forest Robots - Amongst a Landscape of Spiritual Reckoning (2021)

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California-based artist Forest Robots returns to condense his eloquent and talkative electronic instrumental music into a new selection of precious tracks, amiably suspended in the reflective atmospheres that the artist has accustomed us to savor.

The California-based artist Forest Robots returns to condense his eloquent and fluent electronic instrumental music into a new selection of precious tracks, amiably suspended in the suspensive and reflective atmospheres that the artist has accustomed us to savor.

After the acclaimed “After Geography” – album of 2020 which we have talked about previously, right here, and awarded by Bandcamp as Daily’s Best Of 2020, by Electronic Sound Magazine Issue 69, and by The Moderns 2019-2020 – the seasoned mountaineer and electronic composer Fran Dominguez continues to give breath and perspective to his moniker, Forest Robots, by releasing a new 10-track album.

The new work produced by Forest Robots, entitled “Amongst A Landscape Of Spiritual Reckoning”, fits with shrewd organicity in the stylistic characterization outlined so far. So Dominguez does not disappoint our expectations, further sealing the majestic gracefulness that characterizes his style.

The incipit at the base of this creative propulsion appears to be like a real liberating act, which imposes its cadence, here freshly referable with properties of musical language to cycles desired by nature, on which the manufactured stratification of an electronic ambient sound design is superimposed. Something in which Forest Robots has already given ample proof of being a shrewd master in tossing it.

Of course, Ambient and Electronics are two connotative cornerstones of his signature. In some ways essential, especially if related to the subjects that Fran chooses to discuss. However with “Amongst A Landscape Of Spiritual Reckoning” he further expands the breadth of his functional contribution.

Adding further chromatisms and both horizontal and vertical developments, Forest Robots draws on Jazz, Orchestral, Folk, and Drone music, up to the point of following an exciting wind that blows from a new land for him, certainly not close to his beloved California.

It is a wind that blows from the east, perfect underlining to accompany and corroborate the album’s theme, taken to explore the themes of spirituality, existentialism, and ethics. But Forest Robots’ argument is not limited to unraveling preconceptions. It goes further, allowing this probing motion to question how each of those issues relates to parenting experience in the midst of a great global cultural change like the one we are still experiencing today.

“As my daughter grows older and begins to ask questions of a more spiritual and philosophical nature, the experience of parenthood is becoming much more complex for myself,” Says Dominguez, speaking about his album. Then he continues: “The issue of religion versus spirituality as tools to guide her moral compass are at the forefront of my own personal journey to becoming a more competent moral guide. This album serves as a collection of tenets collected for her that are grounded on the idea that we reach a greater understanding of our own spirituality by observing the inner workings of our surroundings and our interconnectedness with them.”

Thus, supporting her sensitivity with organic coherence, in all ten compositions of the album, Fran compares different aspects of nature’s cycles with our spiritual and philosophical cycles. And it is precisely the act of drawing a similar parallel between our external environment and our internal state of being that Forest Robots unearths and brings to light the essence of that immaterial world, empathic, therefore, interpenetrating between the understanding of our struggles. of daily life and self-understanding.

The album has no uplifting pinnacles that rise vehemently. There are no challenging peaks to be gained. There are no outright wins to show off. Instead, there is the vastness of a conscientious climb, conducted with a reflective cadence. Slow but resilient. Quiet but pulsating. To immerse yourself in a beautiful spiritual journey, in which beauty is not in gaining the summit but in the act of making and carrying on the trip itself.