The experience of listening to and watching the lead single and video from Marcus Herne’s “Forms” is a process of experiencing solid forms slowly begin to take shape – both from a pre-existence blackness and a heavy, ambient active stillness. This experience of watching shape-shifting geometric shapes come into view atop the steady linear climb of Herne’s music on “Forms” is a heady audio-visual experience.
Marcus Herne – also known under the moniker Tweed Jacket – has taken inspiration for his EP Forms from “the beauty and brutality of beginnings and evolution, whether it be the birth of a star forming the heart of a vast solar system, or the dawn of human consciousness.” One gets the sense in watching and listening to the titular track that both beauty and brutality are often part of the same process and not necessarily diametrically opposed experiences. Throughout the run time of “Forms” we hear strings, synthesizers and stray piano lines begin to slowly take shape and propagate into a highly rhythmic, staccato drive through it’s evolution. Strings and synths are played and processed in such a way that they begin to feel like stabs of light through thick, hazy blackness as they reach their crescendo. There is little time to breathe when they reach their apex – a series of crescendos happening in 16th note intervals. Stray piano lines punctuate through the inky fog, cutting clear lines of sight and turning our gaze away from the strobing form slowly taking shape in the middle of the screen.
Herne did the visuals for this composition himself. An impressive feat tying the music’s conceptual focus in with a visual metaphor that in itself contains the concept of forms coming into existence, changing in beautiful and brutal way and then sinking back down into the primordial blackness it came from. Lovely work from this up and coming UK musician.
