Even if not fully covered by the majority of music-related mainstream media, Projekt records, the legendary label founded by Sam Rosenthal (the man behind the curtains of the well-known dark wave band Black Tape for a Blue Girl), is super active and keeps on releasing a lot of awesome stuff both from big names of the electronic music scene and new names. Forrest Fang definitely belongs to the first group. Younger readers maybe don't know his name, but the way this Los Angeles-born composer forged his very personal interpretation of electronic world music along the 90ies is undoubtedly one of the more interesting. His first albums were perhaps excessively influenced by European electronic progressive music (some shades of musicians like Mike Oldfield and Jade Warrior are clearly recognizable) and Terry Riley's minimalism. Possibly the eureka moment in his artistic path was the artistic meeting with Zhang Yan, a master of gu-zheng, a Chinese zither, who also introduced him to Oriental philosophy besides some compositional techniques. Her teachings strongly influenced Fang's first proper masterpiece, "The Wolf At The Ruins" (1989), whose impressive combination of acoustic and electronic sounds and the function of percussive elements (typical in Oriental music), that seem to lead melodic lines in spite of being a mere accompaniment, was so amazing that is one of the album that I keep recommending when someone asks for a list of world-music suggestions. I really invite exploring the long path by this discreet composer, but in the meanwhile you can enjoy his last album on Projekt. Apparently the first brick of "The Lost Seasons of Amorphia" – a title that could be perfect for a fantasy saga – was the 22-minutes lasting overture "The Isle of Welcome", coming out of a commission from Chuck Van Zyl's space music radio program, where a placidly sumptuous electronic suites can be thought as a homogeneous ocean of frequencies, where Forrest gently release entities and sequences of what sounds like a (supposedly sampled) Taishogoto (a kinf of Japanese harp) together with lowered tones of some metallophonic or maybe a gamelan of his wide collection to ripple the flow. The reason I mentioned "The Wolf At The Ruins" is not casual at all, as the role of percussion over the following bricks of this ascending constructions by Forrest is closer to the one I briefly described, and this is clear since the following track "Throwing Salt" - whose lines are led by what sounds like a Balinese Kegdang -, but also the ones where there are no proper percussion, the dynamics of strings drifts the entire flow (as it happens on the entrancing "Inlets". I let you discover the other parts of this awesome release, but I can't close this review before thanking Forrest Fang's to unblock one of my nicest video gaming memories by mean of the hypnotic track "From post to Palm", which immediately made me think of nocturnal infinite gaming sessions on "Ballance" and its paper/wooden/metal ball driving on impossible tracks suspended in likewise impossible skies! Have a try!