Forest for the Trees – You Create the Reason
Forest for the Trees – You Create the Reason
Forest for the Trees is one Carl Stephenson, in whose kitchen Beck recorded the “slacker anthem” Loser, which sent him off on his way to rule the pop universe, as unlikely as that may be. Rumor has it that Carl went crazy while working on this album – like, certifiably, locked-down, medicated crazy – and this album doesn’t do much to dissipate that myth. Like Beck, Stephenson throws everything possible into his manic music. But while Beck has an uncanny knack for shaping his sonic stew into palatable pop, Stephenson’s dense collages don’t quite have that indefinable hook that’s necessary for wider pop acceptance. If the underlying material is strong enough, the arrangement almost doesn’t matter – it’s very hard to kill a good pop song by poor arranging. Stephenson may lack this indefinable quality (with the possible exception of the lead off track, Dream), but his music is every bit as interesting as that of his more popular friend.
Taking the basic structure and idiom of hip-hop, Stephenson piles on everything imaginable to create something unlike anything else I’ve heard – where else can you find bagpipes and water drops cozying up to fax machine outputs and roller coaster rides all set to a danceable beat? Only Negativland mines some of the same territory in my collection and, like Negativland, Forest for the Trees is doomed to be ignored by most people because of its bracing originality and the denseness of its weave. Fiercely experimental, the music nevertheless shimmers and shakes pleasantly for all the manic hyperactivity going on around it.
Stephenson is also concerned with matters philosophical and many of his tracks are overlaid with complex vocals about the fundamental nature of reality. You Create the Reason is no exception. I love the opening, with a short dissertation about meditation and the assertion that the Western mind is not used to concentrating while the piercing and incredibly distracting whine of a modem squeals on in the background, illustrating the point perfectly. Then the song kicks in with a broken beat and a million shimmering sounds and a wonderfully robotic vocoder voice repeating the existential assertion that “you create the reason for your existence” like a machine mantra. Then, while all this is going on, Stephenson comes in babbling about cutting edge superstring theory and how “non-existence does not exist” while the music stutters and weaves and everything from heavy metal guitars and old soundtracks and unidentifiable chanting and god knows what else swoops and swirls around. Forest for the Trees is the perfect illustration of the much discussed shattered attention span that’s supposed to plague the younger media-saturated generation taken to an absurd degree. It’s as exhilarating as it is exhausting, like listening to three different radios while trying to follow a metaphysics lecture in a noisy restaurant in a foreign country. One can easily imagine that this dense fog of information could crush the sanity out of a delicate soul and if Carl Stephenson really did go insane, then this is what it must’ve sounded like.