Brooklyn's Nick Forte excels as a noise pop musician, commanding avant garde guitar alongside ambient textures, musique concrete, and disorienting sound collages. Born in 1971, he launched his sonic experiments with guitar in the early 90s before integrating computer processing into the progression of his work. Within the ambient punk duo Christmas Decorations, he shapes lulling melodies that conceal dark undercurrents. Influences from Gert-Jans Prins and German genre-breakers such as Can and Neu shape the results on the duo's debut Model 91, yielding beautiful, succinct pieces that blend anti-folk with Brian Eno. His inaugural solo outing, Pasted Lakes, appeared via Schematic in 2003. The album title mirrors its construction, as Forte assembles epic and natural vistas from fragments of synthetic sound to produce an audio pastiche that proves both grand and detailed, emotive and confounding. He built the tracks from remnants of his initial computer music explorations, repeatedly remixing his own material until it merged seamlessly with the original sources. Forte cites structural inspiration from Wire and the Minutemen, channeling those sources into a computer-based album that adopts the pacing and attitude of classic punk releases while aligning seamlessly with Mego recording artists.
