Forrest Fang: The Fata Morgana Dream
Projekt

However tautological it might sound, the more Forrest Fang personalizes his music, the more it individuates itself from others in the ambient-electronic field. To be precise, it's not so much the San Francisco Bay Area-based artist's compositional voice that marks his music as his but rather the arrangements and instrument choices used in the productions. On The Fata Morgana Dream, his seventeenth solo album in a recording career spanning more than three decades, synthesizer and electronics are augmented by violin, saron, cumbus, Burmese gongs, Japanese palm harp, and Harry Bertoia sound sculpture, among other things.

The album's unusual title includes a term that refers to a special type of mirage that makes objects appear to float in a narrow band immediately above the horizon. It's easy to draw a connecting line from that phenomenon to the eight pieces on the release, considering that Fang purposefully designed the atmospheric material to approximate a state midway between sleep and waking. If the music induces a quasi-dreamlike condition and a sense of time-suspension, said effects are consistent with Fang's intentions. With track titles such as “Lullaby for a Twin Moon” and “Dream of the Last Fisherman” in play, a programmatic character can't help but inform the recording, with these and other titles creating the idea of a nocturnal journey.

After a blissful, electronics-heavy opening establishes a state of luxuriant calm, “The Mouth of the Sea” lunges into action, animated as it is by the emergence of rapid-flowing, dulcimer-like patterns; here in microcosm we witness the move from an intro that could conceivably have been produced by any number of ambient practitioners to a gamelan-inflected swirl that's got Fang's fingerprints all over it. Wrapping themselves around the thrumming center, ethereal choral emissions and vaporous washes add to a dense sound design that swells to epic proportions and carries on into the subsequent roar of “Matted Leaves.” The gamelan dimension resurfaces in the phantasmagoric wail of “Night Procession,” though this time beefed up with polyrhythmic drumming and other percussion flourishes, and in the slow-motion entrancement of “Dream of the Last Fisherman,” whose individual character's heightened by the presence of Burmese gongs and Japanese Palm Harp.

At album's end, Fang first distinguishes “Remembrance Point” by draping echo-drenched ripples of acoustic piano across a base of electronic strings and then individuates “To the End and Back” by threading the snake-like rattle of stroked Bertoia sound sculpture textures into a long-form meditation otherwise built from shimmering violin and synthesizer elements. To Fang's credit, almost every piece separates itself from the others through the incorporation of distinct details, be it violin, piano, or gamelan percussion. As initially stated, it's this that gives his music its personal quality and helps make his recordings particularly rewarding.

April 2019