Search - Forrest Fang :: The Sleepwalker's Ocean

The Sleepwalker's Ocean, Forrest Fang's first 2-CD studio album, is a hypnotic deep-ambient exploration of the fantastical and elusive realm of the subconscious. Following quickly upon his 2015 Letters To The Farthest Star, Fang gave free reign to his intuitive and instinctual side on this release, allowing the sonic landscape to drift into his interior world of elusive and impressionistic thoughts and images.

To me, Fang says, the ocean is not only a symbol of emptiness and space, but also one of unknown depth and mystery. It is much like a dream that seems so real and vast yet is formless because it originates in the mind. For this release, I took a more open-ended approach, allowing in more spontaneous sonic accidents and textures, especially on my first long-form piece, An Alternate Ocean (The Salton Sea). The layered soundscape of my ocean, populated with these accidental characters, ebbs and flows in a vast imaginary sonambulent space.

While Fang embraces the American minimalists and the ambient soundscapes of his contemporaries, he also draws on the gentle percussive textures of Javanese gamelan and on pentatonic scales used in traditional Asian music. Besides using violin, electric mandolin, electric guitar, keyboards and various textural treatments to create complex layers of sound, Fang also plays lesser-known instruments such as Marxolin, saron (Javanese gamelan), and lavta (Turkish lute).

Robert Rich contributes his otherworldly flutes to Message In The Sand and mastered the release.