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Reviews

Forrest Fang — Perihelion
(Projekt PRO429, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-01-09

Perihelion Cover art

What does that title mean? It’s a noun, and describes the point at which any planet, comet, or other orbiting body is nearest to its star — our sun in this solar system, even the far flung objects in the Kuiper belt and beyond (a subject that Fang took on with last year’s The Oort Cloud Meditations), no orbiting body seems to have a perfectly circular orbit, not even close. Now to the music. Perihelion is Forrest Fang’s 22nd album release since his 1980 debut Music from the Blackboard Jungle, and maybe his 16th on the Projekt label (including some early reissues), and after all these years he has an evolving sound that’s easily recognizable, but very difficult to describe to one who has never before heard it. Especially for Perihelion, the words ambient and minimalist do it justice, as well as the term World Music, due to the fact that he uses instruments from across Asia, Africa, and South America to achieve these ends, whether actual instruments, software instruments, or synthesizers, and one will hear plenty of the latter throughout all his music; in earlier times he used to list all of the instruments, but the list has become too long and unwieldy, but the importance of being a composer and arranger with absolutely no limits takes precedence. The ten tracks herein are easy to like and absorb, there are no sharp angles or difficult structural complexities, the sounds just float and flow freely in a natural atmospheric sort of way, with the sparkling pointillistic beauty of an array of world sounds creating the textures and fabric of each piece, no two of which are the same. One will hear tuned percussion, wood, metal, and otherwise, bells, cymbals, gongs, the soft and subtle sound of hand drums, gamelan, wooden blocks, zithers, balofon, santoor, guzheng, and at least as many other instruments that I don’t immediately recognize, all contributing to a dense patchwork of blissful sonic amazement. The only guest is Guy Segers (Eclectic Maybe Band, Univers Zero, and others) who contributes electric bass to one track, “The Serpents Tail”; otherwise Fang does it all, and when you hear any of these pieces it will be no surprise that Perihelion was a full two years in the making. Normally in a review I would start yakking about individual tracks and my impressions thereof, but I’m already pretty long on words, so my best recommendation is to go have a listen at the link below. Be sure and listen to the title track, “Vessels of a Minor Deity,” “Seraphinianus,” “Little Zephyr,” and the aforementioned “The Serpent’s Tail” for starters, but the whole album is nothing short of superb, beginning to end.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Forrest Fang

More info
http://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/perihelion

 

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