Yasmine Des Astres - La Foret Des Amantes (2024)

La Forêt des Amantes was born in a daydream. “At night, under the shining moon of silver, I ran in a forest with the one I love,” describes experimental artist Yasmine des Astres. Arriving at music by necessity, rather than by intention, Yasmine des Astres arranges her voice, live instrumentation and synthesis into cinematic assemblage, drawing as much from filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux, philosopher Georges Bataille and Sufi mystics like Ibn Arabi, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi and Mansour al-Hallaj, as she does any particular sound.

Despite this, the artist remains fiercely opposed to overly academic approaches to her art. Entirely self-taught, her DIY practice emerges as the consolidation of years of personal discovery. Dropping out of school at 15, suffering severe social anxiety, the artist took solace in her mother’s rap cassettes, instilling in her a love for hip hop instrumentals. Before long she was digging for samples online to make her own beats. At the age of 16 she discovered the transcendent Gnosticism of Sun Ra, which shifted her entire worldview forever. However it was the artist’s love of cinema, in particular the films of Robert Bresson, that truly taught her what it means to be an artist. Bresson’s legendary text ‘Notes On The Cinematograph’ helped Yasmine des Astres construct a vision of art with which she could connect her sensations to her emotions.

Specifically, the image of running through a forest at night kept returning to her, a vision she initially understood as a need for freedom, but which gradually developed into a deeper, more intense understanding. Chasing “desire as a liberating and enlightening force,” her dream of liberation became one of sexual exploration and self destruction, while La Forêt des Amantes grew into The Forest of Lesbian Lovers. “It is a dream made out of my lesbian devotion,” the artist asserts. “A desire to annihilate myself through the lesbian I would love.” Citing kindred spirit Obsequeen and Japanese experimental noise rock oddities Les Rallizes Dénudés as sonic influences, with La Forêt des Amantes Yasmine des Astres picks her way through an expansive sonic terrain of effects-laden vocals and off-kilter electronics.

Divided into three chapters, ‘L’Errance’ (‘Wandering’), ‘Mystère’ (‘Mystery’) and ‘Transcendance’ (‘Transcendence’), the forest takes on various forms. ‘Apparition’ opens with eerie auto-tune wail and a tense, freezing synthscape, cascading keys and indiscernible speech breaking out into scattershot kicks, like an animal heartbeat heard loud in the chase. This sets the tone for the project’s first chapter, which traces the uncertain exploration of a nocturnal world. ‘Célébration’ drags ominous percussive creep and teasing plucks of guitar through a synthetic snowstorm, while ‘Pétales Rouges’ blurs plaintive piano and spirallic keys into a crystalline seance. ‘Lune D’Argent’ anchors the artist’s fried voice with a tireless percussive trudge, the ghosts of the beat tapes of her teenage years lending spectral weight to the cold presence of the forest.

With ‘Mystère,’ we are confronted with the enigmatic reality of what Yasmine des Astres has been wandering in search of. The solemn hum and stutter of ‘Le Palais Intérieur’ signals our emergence into a clearing, tensions rising with slow tick and pulse. On ‘Ici Et Maintenant’, an aching communion for connection, garbled singing drifts on sci-fi synth swell, bass throb constantly threatening to burst forth under amorous pressure. ‘Décoré De Ronces’ slices invisible blades through melodies gurgled queasily, the artist’s guttural ejections spat from behind a cybernetic wall of sound. ‘Extase’ tips buzzsaw drone into steamy percussive swing, dark sensuality previously only teased at exploding into forward momentum. As though tracing the anguish of struggling to find a voice, Yasmine des Astres’ vocal experimentation finds purchase in this rough groove, the shape of her desire finally beginning to take form.
Moving from mystery into ‘Transcendence’, the dark space of the forest is finally cast into moonlight. Chilly ambience is tempered with low-end warmth, allowing the artist to find the viscera in her voice. Her muted howls sound in the distance, morphing in and out of the forest’s frequencies as both an appeal to the world-shaping love of the other and an elegy for the destructive power of this love. This is the messy texture of her desire. As swollen bass weight and trap hi-hats tether us back to the forest floor, for the first time we are able to see what Yasmine Des Astres’s forest really is. “The album is about yearning,” she explains. “The forest doesn’t exist, it is not a forest we know. It is an absence. An absence of civilization, an absence of politics, just two lesbians and the universe around them.”

Having ventured through the forest together, the trauma, conflict and resolution of this journey mapped out in sound, we realize that the forest has always been a phantasm conjured by Yasmine Des Astres and her lover. They have been shaping this dream all along and they will be the ones to destroy it.