Hi and welcome. Emmasierra Songs presents for your consideration the release of “Times When I Know You'll Watch The Sky”, the new and third full length album in two years, by Fran Dominguez and Forest Robots. With this album and the accompanying short film, “All Things Grow Faint With Great Adorn In Autumn", also available for viewing here, it is now clear Fran's goal all along has been to build a world of sound around these releases.

 

If the first album, "Supermoon Moonlight Part I" heralded the celebration of Spring, and "Timberline And Mountain Crest”, was a journey through the wonders of Summer, this latest release is a celebratory ode to Autumn. “Times When I Know You’ll Watch The Sky" is a representation of Stanley Horowitz’s quote about fall, where “Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all”.

 

For this release, Fran brings the acoustic, orchestral, synth-wave, ambient and IDM sounds from previous efforts and elevates both the quotient and execution of the project's thematic message. Throughout the album, he threatens to break away from genre altogether with an intricate mixture of synthesizers and acoustic elements that has grown more complex without sounding laborious. Melodies grounded on celesta, glockenspiel and harp quietly envelop themselves with all manner of effects and beats, while vintage synthesizer sounds ooze a nostalgic sheen befitting Autumn.

 

With clockwork-like beat shuffles, exuberant glockenspiel and harp melodies and lush pad choruses, tracks “Just Before Nightfall In The Forest” and “In The Late Autumn Afternoon Rainstorm” bring about dream sequences of open mountain terrains and desolate pristine forests. Meanwhile, waves of synth-based melodies on “Everything Under The Light Of The Full Moon” and “Deep In The Milky Way Spectrum” recalibrate a nostalgia of a retro futuristic past.

 

Forest Robots travels with fantastic confidence throughout the album, from all-out exhilarating themes to quiet moments that suspend you in time, like the Up-right bass-centered “It Lies Sunk Deep Beneath The Old Lake” and the synth saturated, straight-for-the-heart-of-the-sun-like track “The Last Of The Melting Snow”.

 

There is also a title track here which establishes a direct connection from this release to Forest Robots debut album via a part two. However, this track is a more nostalgic, ambient iteration as if now, three albums in, there is a confidence of having built a space at last, where all the music released thus far, can coexist with one another on a grander scale. And it’s a beautiful and inviting space. We enthusiastically invite you to explore it.