Forest Swords' Matthew Barnes on Compassion

At the end of March, Matthew Barnes was bored. At least he knew how his fans felt. He’d spent four years keeping his proverbial finger in as many different pies as possible, but what his followers really wanted was another record as Forest Swords – his second. His debut under that moniker, Engravings, was a violent maelstrom of sounds and ideas, shimmering in its ambience one minute and disturbing in its cacophony the next. Barnes, in the immediate aftermath, had the music world at his feet. He turned left. He disappeared.

Not properly, of course. He just turned his hand to other things. Barnes is a master of the multidisciplinary and in his so-called time off, he penned new music for the Assassin’s Creed video game series, scored a contemporary dance piece co-conceived by Boiler Room and the arts organisation Metal, chipped in towards new Massive Attack material and provided the musical backdrop for a documentary on drones that the BFI produced, In the Robot Skies.

But, as we said, he was bored. Not just that – he was frustrated. Barnes is about to finally release his sophomore full-length as Forest Swords, Compassion, but by late March it seemed like he couldn’t wait to get it out there, into the hands – and ears – of his ardent supporters. He tweeted a phone number, the idea being for fans to hit him up if they wanted new music sent to them directly via WhatsApp. Barnes expected maybe 50 responses. He ended up with well in excess of 700. 

“I had a lot of unreleased stuff,” he says over the phone from his native Merseyside. “Not necessarily finished songs, but sketches and ideas that I quite wanted people to hear. As a musician, there’s a lot of hoops that you have to jump through to get your music to people. If you put it on Spotify, it might just end up getting buried. If you upload it to SoundCloud, that site might die one day and then your songs have gone.

“The thing with WhatsApp was that it felt so much more intimate. I guess it’s because people use it to speak to family and friends every day, so instantly it’s different from Twitter or Facebook. I got some really deep, personal messages. And that was great – it felt like there was something punk about such a direct connection.”

Barnes was ready to go, and that in itself was a touch out of character. In terms of his creative endeavours, he’s always been a cautious fellow in relation to both conception and execution. “I generally like to take my time. It would’ve been really easy to dive straight back into another album rather than take on any other projects, but I’m glad I didn’t. I’ve learned a lot from all the other stuff I did, from setting music to visuals to understanding how best to let my ideas breathe. I’m glad I had the discipline to head down that road.”

After years of keeping the idea of another full-length on the back burner, Barnes finally broke ground on the project last September. What that means is that we’re getting a very different Forest Swords album to the one we might have heard had he jumped into making it two or three years ago – not least because of the nightmarish political climate that we now find ourselves in the thick of.

“I just don’t think it can really be helped at the minute,” admits Barnes. “I don’t think you can make an album – or any piece of art – without that atmosphere somehow seeping in. We all know what the specifics are, but I was very eager to make sure that a) it wasn’t a super-political statement of some sort and b) that there was some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. We’re in this right now, but looking forward is really important, I think. I wanted to make a record that was forward-facing, and that thought about different ways of communication, and different attitudes in terms of how we treat each other. I think I managed that.”

There’s no question that it was this line of thinking that would ultimately feed into Barnes’ radical WhatsApp concept. As fluid as that might make his creative approach and process seem, he’s nothing if not pragmatic; when it came to channeling the disarray of the world surrounding him into his music, he took a straightforward, logical approach. “I think I realised that it’s hard for artists of any kind to make any major change in the world,” he explains, “and that led to me looking at how we can drill down to a hyper-local level. What can we do in our communities to make things better? How can we be part of these subtle shifts to improve our situation? I didn’t want to make something politically heavy – if nothing else, I certainly don’t need to be touring something like that – but there are plenty of echoes of our current environment in there.”

Much of this dramatic reconfiguration was born out of Barnes’ creative anxiety; whatever he did, he was never going to go back and repeat himself. “That’s the thing. I don’t think I’m ever going to change too wildly album to album; I’m a human being, so I’m not going to be a completely different person now, with Compassion, than I was with Engravings three or four years ago. The difference lies in the feel of the songs; I had real fun deconstructing things this time around. Engravings was quite tight, and there wasn’t much space. The tracks really breathe on Compassion.”

That careful, measured balance is evident right on the front cover. Compassion’s artwork features a man, on his back, holding up an enormous rock with the sort of effort that suggests every fibre of his being is involved. Look at his face, though, and you see that he looks – if not impassive – relaxed, almost happy. “I spotted it in an old magazine,” Barnes elucidates. “It just fit. I’m a graphic designer originally, and I enjoy cultivating that relationship between visuals and sound. That image was so striking; it’s ambiguous, but it perfectly summed up everything that was going on in the songs themselves. I’d tried out a few things, but they weren’t quite right, so when I saw something that just was so perfect, I had to go for it, and we went down that road of licensing it and everything else. It’s pretty wild, but I love it.”

Compassion itself embodies that outwards-facing attitude. Unlike its predecessor, it came together all over the world, with Barnes embarking upon writing trips to Bangkok, Istanbul and, in the later stages, the Scottish highlands. “Engravings was very specifically about a certain place, and I had to set that against the fact that I was going to all these cool towns and cities on tour that I never really got the chance to have a look around and soak up. That’s why I made the decision to go back to a couple, in an attempt to come up with something that was more universal. I didn’t want to write another intense love letter to just the one place.”

The next step for Compassion, of course, involves taking it out on the road. For anybody else, that might involve replication, but Barnes is an artist first and a musician second – as a thoughtful fellow, he has plenty of ideas in the pipeline for October’s clutch of UK headline shows. “I’ve got a few festivals booked, so that should be a good opportunity to test stuff out. What I need to run through is the different configurations of the live show – there are different musicians involved, and an audio-visual show to go with it, too.

"I’ve been listening to a lot of jazz recently, and it’s made me realise that a lot of the songs are almost designed to be played live, because of the way that they break down and deconstruct. I used to like the immediacy of playing the tracks just like they are on record, but I want things to be more careful this time.”