Forest Swords (aka electronic producer/composer Matthew Barnes) returns with a new album Bolted. Having spent the past few years working as an in-demand composer and sound designer – writing music for ballet, film and video games – Bolted was recorded over the past year in a warehouse factory space in Barnes’ home city of Liverpool. Across its 11 tracks he dives deeper into his unique sonic vocabulary to weave together a set of tracks that sounds equally muscular and bleak, haunting and euphoric.
As ever in his music, melancholy and euphoria, monochrome and colour, past and future all feel ambiguous. Emotions shift from moment to moment, differences between digital and acoustic instruments more smeared than ever: a queering of time, space and sonics that feels equally playful and totally vital.