Written by: Dave Cantrell

OK, first it might be best if you take a meditative breath or two, let your heart calm, still your surroundings. Next, with your finger hovering above the controls, do that zen thing of listening to the quiet, then, eyes still shut, press play. See that arcade you’ve entered, the psychedelic lights twinkling in hyperdrive, the ice cream smiles of sheer delight on literally every face in the place? Welcome to the remarkably allusive world of forceghost, the Augusta GA-based duo (Marcus Banfield and Eric Kinlaw) whose debut EP unknowing the known released March 1st via Gift Fig Records and we gotta say, what a way to bring in the month.

That first track is entitled “high score!” so the game palace analogy didn’t exactly strain your correspondent’s writing muscle but the story here is the sheer evocativeness at play. Kaleidoscopic but concise with not a note nor effect out of place or overplayed, immersive yet deftly engineered in the scope of its multilayered subtleties, it’s hard to imagine a more definitive opening gambit, it’s like a calling card etched in lasers, its irresisitibility, in concert with its groundedness, it’s soul – the track, like the EP entire, as human as you or I – laying a groundwork that, in its own pop-conscious way, is breaking its own new ground.

“birdies,” gentler of mien, born inside a bassy synth chrysalis, breaks gorgeously open just shy of the ninety-second mark, the melody and its constituent parts blooming ever outward over the track’s last three minutes. More mischievous, more manic than its predecessor, next-up “iffy”‘s impish character is leavened by an odd but settling, jittery calm before central track “melanchronic,” emerging almost tentatively, grows into a sort of storming slow-motion motorik, a moody blizzard of astonishment and emotion, something possibly akin to shoegaze heard at the molecular level, all the beauty, awe, and nuance intact. Past the short sneaker wave “triangles” that will likely have you asking, as it did us, how the playful and the flat-out intense can be so tightly woven together and from whence the album’s title, we end on the wonderfully wandering, hypnotic “oobly doobly” that plays out over its always-focused, never unenchanting four-and-a-half minutes with something of a nursery rhyme mysticism, tracking all the while through a transfixing paradox of hearing the sonically meditative mixing it up with what we can only think to call a kind of sublime Frippian restlessness.

While your Kraftwerks and Clusters and Neus are, along with your Chromes and Minimal Mans, obvious touchstones here the fact is any comparative reckonings crumble in the face of the thing itself. Impeccably named – neither their force not its ghostliness can reasonably be debated – Banfield and Kinlaw, with an agile, esoteric immediacy, have carved their own identifiable niche into that landscape.

As I’ve been writing this review I’ve been sat here at our front room table in our cozy new home in Northern California glancing up now and again at the late season snow blowing past the front window and I’m tempted to suggest that this often startling debut is an ideal accompaniment to just such a scene but aside from being a tad too facile, that thought also sells this record short. Whatever the weather, the prevailing atmospheric conditions, unknowing the known‘s flurry of soundscapes will – almost eerily – adapt to what surrounds. It’s adept that way, nimble with its carroming effects and the songwriting they’re applied to and I can easily see myself teeing this EP up come summertime as heat erases all memory of this day’s frosty clime. Music for all seasons, then, and so, rather cheekily, we’re going to suggest the band consider naming what will be a much-anticipated follow-up christmas in july.