Bleep

Dorchester based imprint Bytes bequeaths us with a wholly necessary blissful moment in the shape of Franz Kirmann's new work Forget Me Not, an album mining a deep audio field filled with entombed longings, half memories and misrememberings.

Looking at the work via the lens of its title, a story of a Greek myth claims that Zeus gave names to all of the plants, and having thought his work concluded a small blue flower having been overlooked called out to him “Forget me not!”. The call for attention stuck and so the flower was named. Similar voices abound in Kirmann's album, snatched from the digital moras and they too call out from the densely populated fields of drone, only this time manipulated beyond our recognition it is unclear what they ask for. Pitched down and spliced together half utterances of reverb fill the work with spectral calls, asking to be recognised perhaps, only their forms remain unclear.

In terms of real work examples Kirmann has cited Fennesz and My Bloody Valentine as inspiration and the warm analogue quality of both these ambient distortion Gnostics percolates through on Forget Me Not, though buried deep in the layers of drone throughout. There is also a similar approach in their deployment of melody-but-not-quite: sounding often as if it were just about to become a song, a tune you'd like to hum..... if only you could remember how.