Forest Robots paints a colourful fall landscape with his new album and short film — premiering exclusively (and simultaneously) on Tinnitist.
Times When I Know You’ll Watch The Sky, the third full-length release in two years from Los Angeles electronica artist Fran Dominguez of Forest Robots, is an album every bit as thoughtful, stylish and romantically wistful as its title. And as if that isn’t enough, it comes accompanied by the gorgeous and surreal short film All Things Grow Faint With Great Adorn In Autumn, adding a striking visual dimension to Dominguez’s vibrant world of emotion and sound.
With the lush and entrancing Times When I Know You’ll Watch The Sky, Dominguez continues his sonic journey through the seasons. His 2018 debut album Supermoon Moonlight Part I heralded the celebration of spring, while followup Timberline And Mountain Crest was a journey through the wonders of summer. Times When I Know You’ll Watch The Sky is a representation of Stanley Horowitz’s quote about fall, where, “Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.”
For this release, Fran brings the acoustic, orchestral, synth-wave, ambient and IDM sounds from previous efforts and elevates both the quotient and execution of the project’s thematic message. Throughout the album, he threatens to break away from genre altogether with an intricate mixture of synthesizers and acoustic elements that has grown more complex without sounding laborious. Melodies grounded on celesta, glockenspiel and harp quietly envelop themselves with all manner of effects and beats, while vintage synthesizer sounds ooze a nostalgic sheen befitting autumn.
With clockwork-like beat shuffles, exuberant glockenspiel and harp melodies and lush pad choruses, tracks Just Before Nightfall In The Forest and In The Late Autumn Afternoon Rainstorm bring about dream sequences of open mountain terrains and desolate pristine forests. Meanwhile, waves of synth-based melodies on Everything Under The Light Of The Full Moon and Deep In The Milky Way Spectrum recalibrate a nostalgia of a retro futuristic past.
Forest Robots travels with fantastic confidence throughout the album, from all-out exhilarating themes to quiet moments that suspend you in time, like the upright bass-centred It Lies Sunk Deep Beneath The Old Lake and the synth-saturated, straight-for-the-heart-of-the-sun-like track The Last Of The Melting Snow. The title track is actually the second part of a song that first appeared on Supermoon Moonlight, though this is a more nostalgic, ambient iteration. It is as if now, three albums in, there is a confidence of having at last built a space where all Forest Robots music can coexist on a grander scale. It’s a beautiful and inviting space. Feel free to explore.
And while you do, savour the 28-minute film All Things Grow Faint With Great Adorn In Autumn, a visual companion to the album and Dominguez’s cinematic interpretation of nature and the transformative effect it has on all of us. Drawing inspiration from works such as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Jiří Barta’s A Ballad About Green Snow, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and the art of the legendary Salvador Dali, the film is a phantasmagorical and psychedelic visual tour de force. Taken together, the film and album form Dominguez’s most grand and epic statement yet — one filled with joyous and nostalgic exhilaration. It is a hopeful statement, a call to open wonderment for every experience we live out in our lives.
Listen to Times When I Know You’ll Watch The Sky below, watch All Things Grow Faint With Great Adorn In Autumn, and learn more about Fran Dominguez and Forest Robots via their website, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
