I’ve long maintained that there are, ultimately, only two kinds of music: good and bad. But increasingly, I’m coming to consider a further distinction may be appropriate: background and foreground. I’m not talking about ambient and then everything else, so much as the rather more personal perspective that I often find it difficult to work or read a book while listening to music (it hasn’t always been thus, so it may be an age thing, I don’t know) because I become engrossed in the music and forget to do the other thing. Of course, there are then brackets of good and bad foreground music, good and bad background music. There’s probably something quite scientific that could be used to explore this theory, but I’ll leave that for someone else should thy wish to take it up.
To skip to the thrust of all of this, the third album from New York City synth trio Forma is good background music, and one which combines science and philosophy within an artistic framework.
The album takes its takes its title from physicalism, which the press release helpfully informs me is ‘the philosophical belief that all phenomena in the universe are created entirely from physical interactions. Using a synthesizer as its foundation, kosmische music turns algorithms into art by investigating infinite possibilities within a set of physical parameters’.
With bubbling synths which pulse, ripple and eddy around shuffling, soft-edged motoric beats to forge mellow expanses of sound built around simple, looping motif, ‘Physicalist’ massages the mind into a state of tranquillity. ‘Collapse of Materialists’ is the aural manifestation of something like a jellyfish, its form somehow illusory as it pulses, contracts and expands, graceful and strange. ‘Spin Glass’ steps up the groove with a more solid sound and sturdier, snare-driven rhythms, but for the most part, it’s minimalist, the shifting layers like nebulae, the movements gradual and existing in time not dictated by human existence.
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‘Physicalist’ is background music because I was able to read and send emails while listening to it, and I wasn’t so engrossed that I didn’t hear some kids knocking on my front door to tell me I’d left the keys in the lock. It’s good music because it explores array of sound and textures, tones and tempos, and does so in a considered, articulate way which feels incredibly natural.
Forma – Physicalist
On Soundcloud
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