#nathan forsyth

[marchingbanana]

MBR-060: Nathan Forsyth “Ashamed”

ASHAMED is the debut album from NATHAN FORSYTH, the newly Atlanta-based artist behind Soothsayer + curator/producer of the Hard Reset podcast.

Guitar sculpting as sharp & fitted as a pair of scissors, meticulous arrangements strewn about Forsyth's intuitive songwriting & impressionistic full-band production. Nathan's songs often stem from a central point or idea & expand outward, eschewing traditional start+end points in favor of more open-ended explorations of construction & arrangement. 

Culling & adding to material from 2012's "Painkillers" EP as well its twin followup, 2013's "Loma City, the seed germinating since 2011 & dating back to our earliest recesses as marching banana, now a final blossoming bud from our bud. The cover features Kennesaw Mountain, which anchors the hometown that now every marching banana contributor has managed to vacate. In a big way this is a final send off to our spent youth, as well as a homecoming of sorts for a young talent we always had deep faith and trust in, a friend & guide in mutual learning and understanding - may we no longer be ashamed. To the new year!!!!! >>https://marchingbanana.bandcamp.com/album/060-ashamed

[marchingbanana]

MBR-047: Nathan Forsyth “Gadget”

Immaculately conceived over either 3 or 5 years between 2011-2016 (who’s to even say at this point), “GADGET” the first full-length ambient album from Nathan Forsyth is out today and ready to wash over your mind and various appendages. 12 tracks of turquoise lucid bliss, an album’s worth of auditory embalming fluid. Rest your weary weary head with this one.

We’ve heard stretches and traces of this type of material throughout Nathan’s earlier releases, twin EP’s Loma City and Painkillers, but never at such a massive and sweeping scale. Across an hour’s worth of sonic paintings, sounds familiar and atypical flow in and out of one another making for someone of a road trip through Forsyth’s mind and emotions - some songs hang in tense stillness, while others breathe and morph and portray a crushing emotional depth. Acoustic elements occasionally pop up, such as in standouts (and back-to-back album closers) “Embryo God” and “Gadget”, but, unlike on 2011 debut Horse, most are wrapped in billowing swathes of synthesizers or found-object sound collage.

Frankly, it’s hard to write about this music because so much of it’s value is placed in your personal perception or experience as a listener - it’s what makes this truly “psychedelic” rather than chasing or imitating what “sounds” psychedelic (which, isn’t that kind of the opposite of true psych intentions anyways?) These songs exist mostly free of structure or modular conceptions of what music and sound ought to operate like. Gadget is, in the artist’s own words,  “an attempt to translate those [kinds of] experiences into sound.” 

It’s been awhile since we heard something new from Nathan Forsyth, even though we know there’s always something cooking back in our hometown Kennesaw, Georgia. Some of the ideas and moments here can be traced back even to that time, when we were literally kids tinkering around with our circuits and amps and brains. As an appropriately-heady closer to this, I’ll call GADGET a lifetime of sound in digital abstract :: look for this summer’s upcoming ASHAMED full-length for the flip side of the coin.