Sounds from the Forest.

3:24 PM

There are in the world some individuals that influenced me in some major or minor way, some of them already started their journey into another dimension, some others still grasps to their earthly existence and some I’m yet to meet them. One of the people that made a huge influence over my persona was my Uncle, aka “Captain Pijama”, in later posts I will talk about him and his mark on me, you’ll see that most of the stuff  I love, in one way or another he was involved by influencing me in so many ways from personal, intellectual, spiritual and the most important for me, the sensorial and imaginative side of me.

Let´s travel back in time early into the 90’s when there were still this “thing” to record mix tapes to someone, either your love interest, maybe some friend or in my case my uncle to his nephew, he always recorded me music he thought I would enjoy, it was like his way of sharing on my Facebook a Youtube video or some Bandcamp project. I’m proud to say I received a lot of mix tapes wich at some point got replaced by CD’s and now most of them in digital form. My uncle made me some kind of music nerd in the sense of collecting music no matter the format, either physical or digital, I need to collect music.

At this point it’s worth mentioning we were both living in different countries, so he sent me the mix tapes by traditional mail, there were no fancy express delivery services accessible to regular people, so he sent me in a yellow envelope with bubbles maybe 2 or 3 mix tapes at a time. Coming home after school and expecting if my uncle had sent me something it was always exciting, and when it did happen, man oh man!!  Best day ever.

One of the cassettes he recorded me had written on side A the name: Deep Forest; by that time I already had some experience listening New Age and Electronic music, mostly Kraftwerk (go figured, I heard those guys maybe at 8 or 9), so I listened to this Deep Forest  mix tape with an open mind.

I turned my cassette player on, put the freshly recorded mix tape and something amazing happened. I start listening to this “music” that I was trying to understand, nothing I’ve listened before came to my mind to relate it. Weird words sounding like African natives, some childish noises with electronic melodies mixed with tribal arrangements, everything fused in such a way my mind started to travel into fantasy worlds. It was the first time I had listened music with lyrics so strange that I immediately wanted to know more about it. Every song I listened it was more amazing than the previous one, the lyrics of this mixed words both folk and mystical made me wonder what were they talking about.


I listened to Deep Forest over and over and over and over, at home, with my Walkman, in the car, everywhere, and each time I found more little noises in the background. I remember writing back to my uncle in one letter (yes, we used to write hand written letters to communicate us) asking him about Deep Forest, he answered me back very exciting telling me the history behind this group. Apparently, one of the two founders named Michael Sánchez returned from a trip from Africa with some recorded sounds and voices. Together with Eric Mouquet, mixed the sounds, created and atmosphere and gave birth to one of the most important and creative Electronic/New Age projects of the 20th century....sounds easy right?

Deep Forest for me was one of the first projects that got me excited waiting for their next album, and then for the next one, and so forth until these days, especially because each album was planned with sounds from another place of Earth, it was exciting to see what was going to be the ending result, none of their albums has ever disappointed me.

By this time the two founders separated ways, Michel Sanchez with his own project and Eric Mouquet kept the Deep Forest brand, for me it’s not bad at all, this means I have more projects from both sides of the coin. The only thing I have to recognize is the fact when you heard them separately, you can notice the things each of them brings to  Deep Forest but even thou together or separated they are both musical geniuses.

All the sounds, the little noises, melodies mixing electronic and tribal sounds transports you to so many worlds of wonder that instinctively your creativity just flows. Up to this day whenever I want to break some type of Creativity Block one of my first choices is Deep Forest, it´s just one of those things that you just can´t get enough, you will always want more, seriously, I can put the whole Discography in one playlist, press shuffle and I can hear it the whole day. My mind and soul relaxes, besides the fact of the awesomeness of the music it has a lot of nostalgia for me, particularly because it was shown to me by my uncle in a very specific moment in my life that marked me so hard, Deep Forest has been part of my life in many special moments, every time I’m working on something, let´s say “creative” I play it at some point, either to start sketching some illustration, to reorganize some ideas or maybe get some inspiration for some far away planet in the galaxy, it just get me there you know.

I suppose by this moment you could assume that while I wrote this post the background music was no other than Deep Forest, I played the first one in a re-mastered version and it´s like the first time I heard it with all the clean sounds and textures, I will always keep listen it just to feel better about myself and to unplug my mind from this reality, this is the best and most valuable thing Deep Forest has, it takes me out of this world  to some other place where I can imagine freely with no restrictions or boundaries, with its music I'm Free.

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