Forest Swords Live

Defiant, desolate, and darkly beautiful – Forest Swords returns after a decade to bring his deep, industrial psychedelia to RISING.

Forest Swords, AKA composer/producer Matthew Barnes, is playing live in Australia for the first time in a decade. He’s unsheathing music that bleeds between muscular and bleak, haunting and euphoric. A set of expressive post-industrial landscapes integrated with HD imagery on ACMI’s massive cinema screen.

After spending the past few years working as an in-demand composer and sound designer – writing music for ballet, film and video games – his latest album Bolted was recorded in a warehouse space in Barnes’ home city of Liverpool. This former vehicle and munitions factory (with connections to shadowy guerilla artists The KLF) became a gateway for him to explore new sounds using a combination of hardware, software and tape machines. Stuck in a rainy winter with a broken foot, he began to see shimmers of psychedelia in the industrial gloom. The world of Bolted is taught, with a sense of urgency. Deconstructed synths, distorted mallets and marimbas bounce off clattering beats, foggy vocals and lightly dancing wind instruments.

Get immersed in the glittering smog.