Forest Swords

Under the name Forest Swords, Matthew Barnes has developed a project from the Wirral in England that sits between experimental electronic music, dub, ambient and contemporary composition. Emerging in the late 2000s with the EP Fjree Feather (2009) and Dagger Paths (2010), Forest Swords’ music initially stood out for its misty textures, muted bass, slow rhythms and fragmented melodic motifs, combining an organic and industrial aesthetic. Forest Swords has since released three studio albums — Engravings (2013), Compassion (2017) and Bolted (2023) — which expand this language toward more orchestral, more percussive or more tense forms, without abandoning the focus on space, resonance and sonic material. Active at the crossroads of electronic, artistic and audiovisual scenes, Forest Swords also curated the DJ-Kicks compilation (2018), produced remixes for Björk, Anohni and These New Puritans, and composed for film, dance and video games, notably Shrine (2016), the documentary Ghosts of Sugar Land (2019) and the game As Dusk Falls (2022). Alongside the music, Matthew Barnes pursues visual and design work that extends the Forest Swords universe.