Forest Swords, aka acclaimed Merseyside-based producer Matthew Barnes, returns with his eagerly anticipated new full-length record.
“Compassion" is the follow-up to 2013's critically lauded debut “Engravings” and released via Ninja Tune. The album will be followed by a set of projects across multiple mediums by Forest Swords’ own Dense Truth, a new experimental studio and record label, including a series of music videos.
“Compassion" engages with an uncertain world we’re experiencing, distilling it into a unique sound territory: Barnes' exploration of the mid-point between ecstasy and frustration, artificial and human feels timely and affecting. The result is an assured, compelling body of work, tying together the ancient and future: weaving swathes of buzzing digital textures, field recordings, clattering beats and distorted jazz sax with fizzing orchestral arrangements.
"Like many, with all that's been going on since I started making the record, I've struggled to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel," says Barnes, "so I realised there's some sort of power in trying to create our own instead. I'm inspired by the ways we're communicating now, for better or worse, and thinking about new channels we can distribute ideas. The idea of looking for flexible future ways of expression and language, that bends to our needs quicker, really excites me”. Barnes launched the record with a unique experiment in new ways to disseminate music, personally sending album tracks through messaging app WhatsApp to anyone who asked.
The album shifts from 'The Highest Flood's skeletal bounce to 'Panic's claustrophobic paranoia; the rapturous hyperballad 'Arms Out' to the windswept and cinematic ‘Knife Edge’, navigating through the orchestral glitch of 'War It' to decaying jazz thump of ‘Raw Language’. The album is equal parts disorienting and immersive, balancing bold sweeping gestures and crumbling textures; tracks seemingly disintegrating and reassembling at points across the album. Blending both digital and specially recorded brass, strings and vocals, Barnes's processing never truly makes it clear what's new or old, sampled or unique, constantly blurring and toying with the line between digital and acoustic.
There will also be a variety of multidisciplinary projects set to run through his Dense Truth umbrella over the coming year: collaborations across dance, performance, film and music. Previous Forest Swords projects include devising and scoring contemporary dance piece ‘Shrine’, composing for the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ video game, collaborating with Massive Attack on their new music, and scoring the first movie made entirely with drones – 'In The Robot Skies’ – which debuted at the BFI London Film Festival.
Central to this enthralling world is “Compassion", an album that's as weighty as it is vulnerable, sculpting the most striking parts of his previous work into something that feels urgent and necessary, and cementing Barnes as one of the UK's most significant electronic artists and composers.
released May 5, 2017

ew York hip hop producer Tony Simon aka Blockhead returns with his third and best instrumental album for Ninja Tune.
Blockhead has long made beautiful, emotive music based around the hip hop template, but on “The Music Scene” he elevates his craft to another level. Tony puts it down to the use of Ableton, which means that rather than working from “one basic beat and building off it” (the standard hip hop model), he has begun stringing together multiple beats and weaving them together into increasingly complex, surprising and satisfying pieces of music. As he himself puts it, “I made each song a little more of a musical journey than anything I have ever done before.”

Simon Green aka Bonobo returns with his sixth album, the masterful, magisterial “Migration” – a record which cements his place in the very highest echelons of electronic music and beyond. By turns lush, manic, beautiful, melancholy, joyful, packed with both emotion and technical skill, this is perhaps his most ambitious attempt yet to capture the very textures of human existence in his work, as Green says of the broad dynamics on the album, "Life has highs, lows, loud and quiet moments, beautiful ones and ugly ones. Music is a reflection of life."
In particular, there is a theme here of migration, eruditely put by Green as “The study of people and spaces,” he expands, “It’s interesting how one person will take an influence from one part of the world and move with that influence and effect another part of the world. Over time, the identities of places evolve.” It is a theme with a personal as well as a sociological aspect to it. Last year, a close family member passed away. “My family and I are all disbanded and spread to far corners of the earth,” explains Green, “In the end we did the funeral in Brighton. My own personal idea of identity, where I am from, and what home is, has played into this record and its migratory themes. Is home where you are or where you are from, when you move around?”
Opener and title track ‘Migration’ sets the tone for the record – a shifting, gradually building combination of complex electronic programming (Green programmed a special algorhythm to create the drum sequencing) and live piano playing, the sense of movement in the music is palpable. ‘Outlier' channels a swinging take on 2-step back into luscious romanticism, before changing direction and finishing hard on the dancefloor (not for nothing has Bonobo talked about the central importance to the overall feel of the album of his all-night Output DJ residencies in NY and his ‘Outlier’ club curation series, where he road-tested tracks). ‘Second Sun’ mixes guitar, feedback and strings in completely unfamiliar ways. ‘Kerala’ takes a RnB vocal sample from a classic Brandy track and uses it more as texture than as voice. This innovation is expanded upon and broadened on ‘Grains’, this time with the voice of folk godfather Pete Seeger.
Beyond this, Green continues his theme of migration, through his guests and also his choice of found sound, which both strengthen and deepen “the transitory nature of the record.” Michael Milosh, from the LA group Rhye, for instance, is originally from Canada and recorded his affecting vocal over the harp and beautiful horn work of ‘Break Apart' in a hotel room in Berlin. Green, meanwhile built the structure of the track during a transatlantic flight (another meaning of “Migration” rests in the fact of making large chunks of the record while out on the road). Nick Murphy (formerly known as Chet Faker), on the other hand, is from Australia, but a shared love of disco brought the pair together for the hugely emotive ‘No Reason’. Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters, originally from Florida, delivers a superbly understated vocal for the glistening textures of ‘Surface’, while Moroccan band Innov Gnawa, based in New York, make up the last of the vocals, offering real grit and beauty to the housey shuffle of ‘Bambro Koyo Ganda’. Additionally, Green has used a sampler (“but not in a big boomer, wearing a cagoule kind of way.”) and woven found sounds such as an elevator in Hong Kong airport, rain in Seattle, a tumble dryer in Atlanta and a fan boat engine in New Orleans into his intricate sonics. A contemporary of artists of the status of Four Tet, Jon Hopkins and Caribou, Bonobo counts among his famous fans the likes of Wiz Khalifa, Skrillex, Disclosure, Diplo and Warpaint. His 2013 album “The North Borders” went Top 30 in the UK and was number 1 in the electronic charts in both the US and UK. In support of that record, the 12 piece band Green runs played 175 shows worldwide, including two sell outs at the Sydney Opera House, an all-day festival at the Roundhouse and a sold out show at Alexandra Palace plus a number of high profile festival slots. Bonobo has built a large, loyal and engaged global fanbase: over half a million album sales and over one hundred and fifty million streams on Spotify point to the levels of success achieved by this quiet, self-effacing man. It might be difficult to imagine it, but “Migration” will take his beautiful, emotive, intricate music to an even bigger audience. After all, the personal can also be universal.

Late Night Tales and Bonobo were pretty much made for each other, it just took them a while to both realise it. Stepping forward into the compiler’s spotlight for the 33rd edition is Simon Green – aka Bonobo – a musician, producer and DJ perfectly suited to soundtrack an evening spent reclining to some parallel beats. Six albums to the good (‘The North Borders’ released earlier in 2013), Green has been on a winning streak since 2010’s breakthrough ‘Black Sands’, which has now sold in excess of 160,000 copies. His music has aided the sales of Citroen cars and Olay creams, as well as soothing the puzzlement of Lost. Wrapped in delicately programmed drums, Green’s music is at once both sombre and reassuring. If what comes out the other end is the music of Bonobo, then this is the fuel that keeps the engine running: soul, jazz, classical, pop, funk, leftfield, rock. Pianos and brass are abundantly present. Our ivories are warmed and tickled by the classic, Bill Evans, and new school, with Matthew Bourne’s mournfully beautiful ‘Juliet’ and Dustin O’Halloran’s ‘An Ending A Beginning’. The brass section comes courtesy of Menehan Street Band’s jazzy ‘The Traitor’, ‘Flipside’ by the Hypnotic Brass Band. Also included is YouTube sensation ‘One Thing’ by Peter & Kerry, R&S signing Airhead, jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby and the timeless soul of Dorando’s ‘Didn’t I’. Not only that, but there’s Bonobo’s special LNT cover version, a brilliant reading of Donovan’s ‘Get Thy Bearings’. As the light dims, the unsettling sounds of Lapalux or maybe even Shlomo pierce the misty evening air, before giving way to the ethereal splendour of Eddi Front’s ‘Gigantic’ or even Nina Simone’s paean to an imagined rural idyll ‘Baltimore’. Amble down to the riverside. It could be the Great Ouse, as willows weep into the water; it could even be in Brooklyn overlooking the Lower East Side, as the sun slides down the sides of the skyscrapers. Take a notepad for inspiration. Maybe even a hipflask for a slug of something warm. Sit down and reflect and let those beautiful pianos skim the water’s surface. Sometimes, you think, life is good. You can’t play a symphony alone, it takes an orchestra to play it: Simon Green is your conductor.

"The way I approached this mix was very different to how I would normally. I wasn’t thinking of it as a DJ mix so much as a selection. I’ve been familiar with the series for a long time, and I was conscious of that, but I really wanted to put together a curated selection. The criteria for choosing the songs was really music I’ve been playing away from the dance floor over the years. So there’s a wider variety of stuff on here, from neo-classical to more abstract electronic pieces to spiritual jazz. It's more a reflection of the stuff my music is informed by." - Bonobo

2010 release. Simon Green (AKA Bonobo) returns with his fourth and finest album, Black Sands. Losing none of his epic emotionalism, his control of texture and color and his subtlety, Black Sands sees Green making some of his most contemporary-sounding music to date.

Bonobo将在英国电音名厂Ninja Tune发行其新碟《Days to come》,仍然是讨人欢喜的Ambient,轻鬆的Downtempo曲式配以Bajka独特的歌声勾画出更清爽的轮廓,Simon Green点点地把Soul Jazz揉进碎拍节奏中,带来像「Between The Lines」般神化的big band jazz曲子,尔后的「Nightlite」把情感转为缓慢 , 情绪高低起伏过后还是有明亮温暖的 Chill Out「If You Stayed Over」供人享用 , 还找了同是Ninja Tune旗下的Fink来发声。《Days to come》让聆听者感受音符的冷与热 , 时而出现的Lo-fi曲目如怀旧的「Days To Come」精美得叫人乍舌 , Simon Green是越来越会掌控人心了。