GUEST REVIEW: "Dream Technicians: London," the New Bandcamp Sampler Comp from Decommissioned Forests - Stereo Embers Magazine Stereo Embers Magazine

[Special guest review from MICHEL ROWLAND]

Words often used to describe London trio Decommissioned Forests might be loosely strung together as “ambient post-industrial outsider electronica”. A term preferred by the group themselves, however, is the title for their latest digital promo sampler – Dream Technicians: London – available now for free download from Bandcamp, and streaming via all the usual outlets.

Decommissioned Forests are multi-instrumentalist and producer Daniel Vincent; spoken-word narrator and lyricist Max Rael; and electronic musician, visual artist and film-maker Howard Gardner. Brought together between 2017 and 2018 by a shared love of Coil, Current 93, NIN, Cluster, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle et al, a key premise behind their collaboration is that members all perform entirely different roles within Decommissioned Forests than in each of their other projects:

Daniel Vincent, normally guitarist for post-progressive ‘space rock’ outfit The Resonance Association, focuses instead on synths, programming, and other electronic instruments for Decommissioned Forests.
Max Rael, who provides the trio’s lyrics and largely spoken-word vocals, can otherwise be found performing synths, electronics and programming with industrial electro-punks History of Guns.
Howard Gardner, the dark-ambient / power noise / industrial musician behind Non-Bio, is here deployed creating samples and electronic noises, while also producing the group’s films and other visual media.

Dream Technicians brings together selected highlights of their output together from 2017-2023, culled from an impressive and prolific array of singles and EPs, two studio albums (2019’s Forestry and last year’s Industry), and assorted oddities along the way. These are further augmented by a couple of previously unreleased mixes (tracks 1 and 8), exclusive to Dream Technicians.

Fittingly, the collection opens with a new version of the project’s 2017 debut single, ‘Impermanent State’. The ‘2022 Mix’ featured here, however, adds the hypnotic spoken word of Rael who, in 2017, had yet to join Vincent and Gardner in the project; with Vincent in turn updating the track with not-insubstantial polish to the original mix. With its gently distorted drones and muffled glitchy beats, ‘Impermanent State’ sets the stage for many of the longer pieces included on Dream Technicians; the group’s idiosyncratic sound often falling somewhere between all-enveloping ambient-electronica, and something more unsettling and off-kilter.

‘Impermanent State’ is followed by ‘Drifting into Darkness’ and ‘Asleep Under the Leaves’, both of which appeared on the debut album Forestry, in April 2019. ‘Drifting into Darkness’ could have been composed for a late 1980s horror soundtrack, replete with Daniel Vincent’s haunting pianos and even a swooning saxophone sample, atop a drifting ambient-progressive backdrop, enhanced by comparatively modern electronic textures. ‘Asleep Under the Leaves’, which also had an earlier stand-alone release in 2018, creates tension between Rael’s lyrical themes of pastoral, nature-based religion set against a more urban, futuristic city-scape soundtrack; while an underlying cynicism and bitter sense of disillusionment adds a sinister twist to neo-Paganism as the track progresses.

Where the first half of Dream Technicians is primarily focused on 2017-19 material, leading up to and including the Forestry album, ‘Base’ (track 4) deviates slightly from that chronology – a virtual ‘b-side’ to the ‘Ants Part 1’ digital single, from November of 2021. Processional percussion and droning instrumentation evoke something of an “ancient Celtic” atmosphere, joining with a solemn piano and repeated vocal line to create a dirge-like chant, with only subtle interjections from more ambient-electronic elements. ‘Impermanence’ (track 5 – not to be conflated with the opener, ‘Impermanent State’), is again lifted from the Forestry album, and returns to eerie horror-film pianos with more chilling dissonance and tension than before; landing somewhere between an abandoned Coil theme for Hellraiser, and a proto-synthwave John Carpenter piece. Near-instrumental, the track’s ‘vocals’ are principally composed of heavily-worked vocoders and buried whispers.

‘Bad Dust’ is taken from the mini-album Fortean Amps (February 2022): a collection of long-form pieces created “for transportation and transcendence” during sessions for the second full-length album, Industry (April 2022). Rising from an ominous and solitary drone, it is gradually joined by garbled, indecipherable voices and obscured samples; followed by sweeping synth pads, and layers of resonant, sometimes subtly distorted textures. Most of this eventually gives way to a heavily warped and manipulated sound that could just as easily be an extra-terrestrial transmission heralding imminent invasion, or the distant ancestral echo of some primordial war trumpet. Ranging back and forth between moments of menacing unease and sublime transcendence, while clocking in at just over twenty minutes, ‘Bad Dust’ is certainly the most immersive piece featured.

‘Functional Programming for Humans of the Future’ first emerged alongside ‘Base’ in late 2021, under a slightly shortened name (‘Functional Programming for Humans’), on ‘Ants Part 1’: the first single released ahead of the Industry album. Wistfully aching drones, like the decaying echoes of submerged bells, are later interrupted by more jarring and emphatic vocal utterances: Rael again contrasting an early sense of hopeful idealism with the disenchantment that inevitably follows. He recounts conversations in which two people’s ideologies and aspirations of achieving mastery over their base human impulses, functions, and social conditioning gradually drift further apart; while underneath, Vincent and Gardner’s amniotic sound-bed too grows increasingly disturbed. ‘These Triggers’, meanwhile, is a previously unreleased remix of the Industry track simply titled ‘Triggers’; this version calling to mind both Kraftwerk and Suicide. Much shorter and more immediate, uptempo, and DJ-friendly than its original album iteration, the track is here rebuilt from retro synth-bass, kitschy synth, and the shimmering pitter-patter of vintage drum-machines. To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it costs a lot of money to sound this cheap.

‘A Comforting Uncertainty’ is the only track included on Dream Technicians to be lifted directly from the Industry album, rather than an alternate single mix, accompanying b-side, or ancillary session. It had also been issued separately in February 2022, as the audio component to an award-winning short film of the same name, by Howard Gardner. Both aurally and lyrically, ‘A Comforting Uncertainty’ delivers exactly what it says on the tin – Rael as narrator deriving some meagre solace and reassurance from the unavoidable conclusion that no matter one’s best laid plans, “something will go wrong.” An undeniable highlight from the group’s catalogue, and perhaps also their most widely-known release to date, the title ‘A Comforting Uncertainty’ alone has for many come to define and characterise the Decommissioned Forests sound. It is also likely this track more than any other has elicited the frequent comparisons to Coil: the growingly demented ‘sing-song’ aspects of Max Rael’s vocal, as the piece nears its culmination, echoing the disquieting and wilful discord of the late Jhonn Balance. The film, meanwhile – perhaps not directly related to the lyrical narrative – is reminiscent of unnerving British Sci-Fi television of the 1970s and early ‘80s (Dr Who, Blake’s 7, Sapphire and Steel, Tomorrow People), coupled with the adult sophistication of THX-1138, Bladerunner, or 1984. Written and directed by Gardner and starring Rael, the latter plays a citizen from a dystopian future, in which thoughts and emotions are controlled by insectoid alien overlords.

The Dream Technicians album closes with the Video Edit of ‘Drop Brick’, first released on the 8-track remix single by the same name, in February 2022. It is near-identical to the final Industry version from April of that year, but with certain lyrical content altered for YouTube and radio. Vincent’s synths and organs recall Philip Glass’s main theme for the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film, Koyaanisqatsi (from the Hopi word for “life out of balance”). An increased sense of abrasive urgency is driven along by Gardner’s atonal noise inclusions, while a self-deprecating Rael angrily flagellates himself over the futile need to feed one’s own monstrous inner void.

While ultimately serving as a retrospective promo sampler, Dream Technicians stands as an accomplished album in its own right. Both the running order and painstaking remastering process have served to create a beautifully curated collection, with a coherent flow from start to end, and a near-comprehensive showcase of the group’s dynamic range. An excellent primer for listeners new to Decommissioned Forests, perhaps its only weakness is that the format does not quite allow for a fuller exploration of their entire range of output.

Highly recommended: 9/10.