Franz Kirmann - Forget Me Not (2022)

Franz Kirmann returns to Bytes for his sixth solo album, Forget Me Not, travelling inland to explore buried emotions of longing and loss. Influenced by My Bloody Valentine and Fennesz, the music of Forget Me Not is drenched in blurry melancholy, with fragments of melodies and disembodied voices reaching out through dense, textured clouds of sound. The title refers to the way the record was made, with Kirmann manipulating old songs, zooming into the fabric of the music to grab particles of sound and freeze them in time, forever.

A meditation on past mistakes, past love and the passing of time, the compositions on Forget Me Not are akin to paintings, layered and still, the slowed-down voices from the deconstructed songs echo through heavy reverberation, becoming distant and sepulchral, evocations of a distant past. The melodies, half erased, become almost subliminal.