Forest Factory — Holzweg
Post-production is our reality; the musical one, too. That’s stating the obvious, I realise, but it helps maybe to couch how things once marshalled in service of a final, organic whole, have now splintered into effects that any DAW-savvy doofus can cull together. While that may sound derisive, it might just be a way to come to terms with the jarring, cut-and-paste aesthetic of Forest Factory’s (Elvin Brandhi and Andreas Trobollowitsch) Holzweg.
If the album as a whole were an envelope generator, the attack knob would be maxed out. There are voices shouting, crunchy, Autechre-inspired textures crinkling like metal paper, and plenty of looped samples animating the maelstrom. There are ten of these aural jump cuts in all, each around three to four minutes.
The opening track, “TIKTIKTIK” is a warning shot, a sonic manifesto laying out the tools of this accelerationist diatribe—quick cuts, the aforementioned yelling, plenty of bass, and those arid machines of 90s IDM. In other words, don’t expect a soundtrack you can dance to, or a meditative journey into cosmic space. “Forest Lost”, the longest of the pieces, functions like a title track, underlining the name given to the album: a colloquial German expression for going down the wrong path. Forest Factory are showing their cards and delighting in the frenzied results. It is not a rejoicing, though it is also not a corny lament. Rather, something more fundamental is being mimed here: The technical means of music production have outrun us, and there is but to make a farce of its language and tricks. The locked-groove sample of Holzweg’s final track, “Re-Rotation-Sun”, includes brief utterances of “dust”, as if the humans are finally learning how to communicate by naming the specific instances and modes of interference.
Holzweg is certainly not for everyone. or every mood, but that’s the point, I guess: to disrupt our everyday ways of hearing and making music. If that’s your thing, then even the mildly curious will want to hear what those crazy kids are making of very, very late capital.