Deep Forest

Deep Forest is a couple of computer musicians from France, Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet, who married beautifully produced ambient dub with stolen samples of rainforest pygmies to striking effect. The music is gorgeous and serene and slightly exotic, but there’s something troubling about the disc.

The music is not, in any real sense, a collaboration. The pygmies’ vocals have been cut apart and rearranged in such a way that they no longer resemble what they were originally like. As I understand it, the “songs” that the pygmies sing aren’t at all what we consider songs, but are much more akin to pure communication (rather than entertainment). Also, the tonality of the original songs is very different to the kind of music we – as Westerners – are used to hearing. But there’s no sense of that in these pieces. The source material has been cut and pasted and polished and fluffed to be pleasing to our ears, while stripping away all of the context that makes this music vital and interesting to the people that originally created it.

I know, who cares? That’s the nature of this kind of music and sampling in general. By stealing a quote from somebody, you can subliminally reference the entire context from which that excerpt was pulled – whether it be the hardest working man in showbiz getting his groove on in a sweaty club, a drummer who has mastered the perfect beat, a smoky singer pouring her heart into a glass of bourbon, or pygmies from the deep forest. There’s nothing that different in this recording than in MC Hammer biting Rick James, or Soul Sonic Force stealing Kraftwerk, except that those recordings are all in the same cultural context. But if that’s my complaint, then I should dislike Brian Eno and David Byrne writing psuedo-polyrhythmic jams around Lebanese singers and field recordings of Algerians chanting the Qu’ran, but I don’t. Their approach at least seems a little more respectful, whether it is or not, because they keep the source material more intact and try to write around it, rather than trying to fit the source into a mold that’s already been built. Maybe I’m being too harsh and just splitting hairs. But it does seem more exploitative to mangle the ethnographic source so badly just to give a slightly exotic polish to these tracks. The tracks would be good on their own, but it’s the voices that really make them shine. Plus, Deep Forest is almost unbearably pompous about their music and what it signifies, claiming on their website that “way before the Caribbean and Cuba became such sought-after tourist destinations, Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet pointed their magic wands towards this region of the globe”. Umm, excuse me? They also claim to have “not only invented a sound different from any other, they have also created a language”. I also find the opening narration to the album more than a little pompous and patronizing as well: “Somewhere deep in the jungle are living some little men and women. They are our past. And maybe, maybe they are our future.” Please.

After this record, Deep Forest went on to make a few other albums, and each time, they “collaborated” with a different set of musicians from a different “exotic” locale (the fetishization of the Other). If you can look past the dubious politics, the discs are pleasant enough (although this first is by far the best), and if you can’t, then it’s just another example of cultural colonialism wrapped in a pretty package. Although, to be fair, they do claim to share their albums’ royalties with organizations in each of the countries whose culture they pillage. Or, rather, they “wish” to share royalties, whatever that might mean.