Forest Swords (aka electronic producer/composer Matthew Barnes) is back. After spending 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 twelve months in Barnes’ hometown of Liverpool. His ad hoc studio in a former vehicle and munitions factory (with connections to shadowy guerrilla artists The KLF) became a conduit for him to explore, using a combination of hardware, software, and tape machines to mould and sculpt a sonic world for the album. Across its 11 tracks, it delves deeper into his unique sonic vocabulary (including personal samples from Neneh Cherry and the late Lee Scratch Perry) to weave together a set of tracks that sound equally muscular and dark, enchanting and euphoric. While his previous album – 2017’s acclaimed ‘Compassion’ – saw Barnes toy with a widescreen technique, the world of ‘Bolted’ is tightly wound, taught, with a painful sense of urgency like never before.
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