Review: Forresta – Bass, Space & Time

Microbial growth and astral emptiness. Miniature plants and empty space. Somehow, Forresta has me depicting both simultaneously: the shudders of cell division as tiny noises expand, backdropped by echoes that splay infinitely in every direction. Tonality manifests in subtle presences, with harmonies implied by the slight rattle of bass guitar strings or resonances that melt through the instrument body. These sounds are then smeared across the air by cavernous acoustics, rendered pale as they stretch to the stereo perimeter and diffuse into a sigh of multidirectional air pressure. These two opposites of scale, which couldn’t possibly co-exist in a visual representation, find kinship in the fluctuative, boundary-oblivious world of sound. The album is built upon tiny twitches of movement and micro-expression, most of which would go by undetected if kept at their original scale. Yet through expansive powers of reverberation, these tiny glimmers of the implied become rich catastrophes and euphorias; black holes built entirely from momentary reflex.

In amongst the 74 minutes of drone are passages of rhythm – fragmented bitcrushed techno, amplified bodily pulse – which arrive like meteor showers in the vacuum. Suddenly, a record that largely subsists on spectres and illuminations becomes very physical, albeit temporarily; thumps and hums fall into metronomic alignment as the music drives forward, arcing up and down over the tides of passing time, before releasing once more into voids of murmur, twitch and infinite plateau. Energy is accumulated and dispelled. Regardless how close Bass, Space & Time comes to a state of happening, the effort is always unwound and rendered inconsequential by the return to emptiness, reducing into half-drones and tinges of feedback, forever destined to circle the basin of eternity.