Equally at ease crafting tortuous club tracks than building celestial soundscapes and producing for other artists, Sébastien Forrester has always had a recurring obsession with traditional and idiosyncratic sounds – his very first encounter with music as a child was indeed the Bwiti ritual drums, while living in Gabon, Central Africa, with his family in the early 2000s.
Formerly known as Holy Strays (acclaimed by the likes of Pitchfork, the Fader, Fact Magazine, Dazed, Les Inrocks, etc), the Paris-based Franco-British percussionist and sound artist started releasing music early on, at the age of 19, and has put out records on several international labels such as Not Not Fun and Hands in the Dark, bringing to life the crossroads of leftfield drumming, ceremonial atmospherics and eruptive sound design.
Over the past decade, he has also remixed Rejjie Snow, SUUNS and Forest Swords, and shared stages with acts as diverse as SBTRKT, The Soft Moon and Zola Jesus, all across Europe (Berliner Festspiele, the Great Escape, Transmusicales and more). His latest pieces of work, such as the propulsive ‘Turmoil’ EP on Paris-based powerhouse Promesses, and the labyrinthine, chimerical ‘Orpheus’ Pipes’ project on SUPERPANG, explore his relationship to trance and medieval percussion instruments, as well as the special timbre of the bagpipe, that makes the link between his British roots and the Occitan part of his family in Aveyron, France. His recent collaborations include Brodinski, Lafawndah, Slikback, Coby Sey, Ehua, as well as Toulouse-based experimental choreographer Pierre Rigal and dancer and performer Emmanuelle Soum, among others.
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