Teleseen Releases Fear Of The Forest

New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ Percepts) - Teleseen's second album Fear of The Forest takes the militant industrial greyscale constructions from 2007's WAR and smears them with neon green. The rhythmic grids of dancehall, ragga, two step, reggae and soul melt into each other forming a psychedelic lattice on which multivalent ambiences, melodies and vocals hang, splayed open like a tree that has been malformed by a vine grown around it for decades. Tightening to reveal hidden forms, creating a conglomerate from a singularity, a wilderness of one. The voice appears and reappears in this drama, first in the warbling intonations that close out the first track, "Prophecy is Fulfillment in The Mouth of The Land", speaking impassioned, just outside the range of intelligibility. The dissected disco of "All The Ash That Allowed", gives way to "Black Monday" a neo-classical one drop rhythm, ornamented with multiplying breakcore fragments, behind a robotic redemption song. The jungle is burning and we need a new place to live.

As the album migrates on other voices appear, Afro-Soul singer Abena Koomson brings us two tales, one of love strengthening and another of love shattered, promising to be redeemed. Meanwhile someone has left a radio on in Kigali, another in Nablus, another in La Paz and the channels all bleed. Billy Woods first warns us of the drug of power, and then celebrates the power of drugs, over beats that are at turns mutant bhangra and the lurching, bouncing bastard children of hip hop and reggae. Members of Brooklyn's Zozo Afro Beat Orchestra turn up for the party on "The Echo Will Triumph Over The Voice", a song that winces into the future with a vintage toughness hardly found on most recent new school dub. In the end, it all comes to a head; the revolution will be delayed, and the echo will triumph over the voice, if you are not working with people, you will not survive.

Based in Brooklyn, but nomadic in geographies real and imagined, Teleseen is the primary alias of producer and multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Cyr. Since releasing his debut album WAR to critical acclaim in 2007 Teleseen has fast become one of the leading producers on the vanguard of combining dub and reggae with experimental electronic music, without falling into the narrow genre ghettos defined by dubstep or so called "dub techno". Pitchfork has called him "and electronic MC Escher" and the Wire called WAR "A Zen slap to the back of the head". Cyr has played and djed all over Europe, the Americas and Africa and hosts a thrice monthly radio on New York's free103point9.