There is a wonderfully mischievous ambiguity in the title "Holzweg". In German, it refers literally to a path through the woods, but figuratively it means taking the wrong path, following a mistaken idea, ending up somewhere you did not intend to go. Forest Factory, the duo of Welsh improvising vocalist and sound artist Elvin Brandhi and Austrian composer and instrument-builder Andreas Trobollowitsch, seem to understand both meanings perfectly. "Holzweg" is made with wood, branches, mechanical turntables, voices and samplers, but it also sounds as if the two musicians have deliberately abandoned the sensible road signs of contemporary experimental music. No GPS, no reassuring arrows, no little voice announcing that you have reached your destination. Just keep walking.
That is not entirely surprising given the backgrounds involved. Brandhi has spent much of her career turning field recordings, tapes, vinyl, instruments and voice into unstable rhythmic structures, while her nomadic practice has taken her through an unusually wide network of collaborations and artistic communities. Trobollowitsch, meanwhile, has developed a body of work around prepared and self-built instruments, modified objects, plants, rotation, vibration, feedback and the relationship between sound, movement and physical space. Put them together and the distinction between instrument, object and environment starts to become rather inconvenient, which is precisely where "Holzweg" becomes interesting.
The album was assembled from recordings made in Naples, Yogyakarta and during the duo's 2024 Japanese tour, so its geography is not merely decorative information in the press sheet. The different locations become part of the record's unstable identity. Rather than attempting to disguise these shifts beneath a uniform studio finish, Forest Factory seem to let the material retain its different densities and temperatures. The result feels less like a conventional collection of compositions than an assortment of specimens brought back from several expeditions, then placed on the same laboratory table to see which ones start moving.
"TIKTIKTIK" immediately establishes this logic. Repetition here does not mean the comforting predictability of a beat; it feels closer to a mechanical process discovering its own rhythm. "METAL" introduces a harder, more abrasive physicality, while "NAKAMA PIETURA" and "ST TSEROF" suggest that Forest Factory have little interest in explaining exactly where one sound comes from. Their titles behave almost like found objects themselves: fragments of language whose meanings remain partially concealed, leaving the ear to perform its own archaeological work.
The most revealing title may be "FOREST LOST". If the album's name promises a path, this is where the signpost finally falls over. The forest is not presented as some postcard-friendly reservoir of organic beauty, full of birds chirping politely while humans contemplate their spiritual renewal. This is a forest understood through friction, rotation, impact and amplification. Wood becomes percussion, surface, obstacle and resonant body. The supposedly natural is subjected to machinery, while the machinery itself begins to behave like something biological. Forest and factory stop being opposites.
That tension is central to the record. There is something almost comic about the basic premise: two experimental musicians build turntables for pieces of wood and branches, then use them to make an album. Civilization spent several centuries developing increasingly sophisticated machines, and eventually somebody looked at a branch and thought, reasonably enough, “this could use a turntable”. Yet the apparent absurdity conceals a serious investigation into how sound is produced. The handmade mechanisms make physical cause and sonic consequence unusually close. You can sense the object being manipulated rather than simply hearing the polished result.
Brandhi's voice is crucial because it prevents the music from becoming an overly tasteful exercise in material-based electroacoustics. Her vocal presence can function as language, rhythm, noise or sudden human interruption, and her long-standing interest in dismantling conventional syntax makes her particularly suited to a project in which objects themselves seem to be speaking in an unfamiliar grammar. When the voice appears against the brittle mechanical textures, it does not necessarily clarify them. It becomes another piece of matter.
Trobollowitsch's contribution works in the opposite direction without actually opposing Brandhi. His practice has consistently treated sound as something physical and spatial, with self-developed instruments and modified everyday materials providing the mechanisms through which composition can happen. "Holzweg" therefore feels less like a meeting between “electronic music” and “acoustic music” than an attempt to make that distinction increasingly useless. A wooden plate can become an oscillator; a branch can become a percussionist; a human voice can become circuitry; a sampler can preserve the memory of something that was never intended to be musical in the first place.
"POPPU" and "TWIST" push the record into more animated territory, while "WOULDCHUCK" has the slightly mischievous quality of something whose internal logic you suspect you are almost understanding before it changes direction. "KASA" is another reminder that these pieces are not simply exercises in abrasion. There is space here, too, and an awareness of silence, resonance and duration. The final "RE-ROTATION SUN" provides a suitably circular conclusion, as if the machine has completed one revolution only to discover that the forest has not moved anywhere at all.
The ten pieces are short enough to avoid turning the project into an academic demonstration of how interesting wood can be. This matters. "Holzweg" is experimental, but it does not seem particularly interested in proving its experimental credentials. Its charm comes from the fact that the underlying mechanisms remain audible without becoming the whole point. There is humour in the clatter, sensuality in the vibration, menace in the metallic edges and something almost primitive in the repeated gestures. The record continually oscillates between deliberate construction and the possibility of accident.
That balance also explains why the album fits so naturally with ato.archives, the Tokyo-based label and archive whose catalogue moves through experimental, electroacoustic and sound-art practices. "Holzweg" has the quality of an artefact that could have been dug out of an imaginary archive devoted to machines that never quite became machines. It documents a peculiar musical technology, but also a way of thinking about collaboration, geography and material.
Ultimately, Forest Factory do not make the forest sound beautiful. They make it sound problematic, which is much more interesting. Nature here is neither pristine sanctuary nor convenient sample library. It scratches, rotates, splinters, loops and interferes. Technology does not conquer it, and neither does the human performer. The three simply get in each other's way until something musical emerges.
And perhaps that is the real joke hidden inside "Holzweg". Being on the wrong path is usually considered an error, but in experimental music it can be the beginning of a method. Forest Factory understand that getting lost is sometimes the only way to discover that the map was rather boring in the first place.