This is the matrix of Horst & Graben, the new album penned by the Californian composer and seasoned mountaineer Fran Dominguez, conceived somewhere between the Electronic and Experimental folds.

But as the signature that distinguishes Forest Robots wants, even in Horst & Graben, the synthetic synthesis finds new cycles, new intentions, precisely in the naturalness, in the vastness, in the fullness-emptiness dualism that we can discover by moving away from a civilization engulfed by concrete.

A sensory richness that we have already tasted in Dominguez’s previous works. Also, in this new album, we find his compositional flair and his ability to extract, synthesize, and rework according to his vision, that richness inherent in contemplating the discoveries made in over 400 ascents and 6,000 miles of x-country river crossing, rock climbing, snow trudging, rock scrambling, and bushwhacking.

And fortunately, Dominguez remains faithful to his path. Although Horst & Graben is inspired by stories taken from a book – therefore a panorama, that of “The Songs of Tree” by David George Haskell, which one might think to be more circumscribed – Forest Robots does not fail to collect ideas, themes, and spring suggestions. Then embedding Folk, Neoclassical, and Drone elements, he channels them into an Ambient flow with a strong Experimental Electronic connotation.

Of course, in line with the artist’s previous works, even Horst & Graben is an album that requires time to be listened to, tasted, then assimilated. Not a frugal listening, this release demands appropriate time brackets: to be dedicated not only to mere listening but to allow the double, triple, sometimes even quadruple layers assembled by the tracks, to take space, body, to expand and allow us to see the whole parable.

This is how Forest Robots refactor the reflection on the stories written by Haskell and use them to vectorize with harmonic and natural synchronism the direction of our sense of spirituality and existentialism.