Brooklyn's Nick Forte, a noise pop musician in the best sense of the word, is a master of everything from avant garde guitar to ambient textures to musique concrete to disorienting sound collages. Born in 1971, Forte began experimenting with a guitar in the early 90s, later adding computer processing into his musical evolution. As half of the ambient punk duo, Christmas Decorations, Forte crafts lulling melodies with dark undercurrents bubbling beneath the surface. He's inspired by composers such as Gert-Jans Prins as well as German genre-breakers like Can and Neu which, on Christmas Decorations' brilliant debut, Model 91, results in beautiful, succinct pieces where anti-folk meets Brian Eno. Forte's first solo record, Pasted Lakes, was released on Schematic in 2003. The title describes the music aptly -- with this album Forte constructs epic and natural vistas out of chunks of synthetic sound, creating an audio pastiche that is both grand and detailed, emotive and confounding. He assembled the music out of the scraps and remains of his first foray into computer music, essentially remixing his own work until it was indistinguishable from the source sounds. Forte claims to have been inspired structurally by Wire and the Minutemen, and has used these influences to make a computer album that applies the pacing and attitude of old punk records, but would fit perfectly alongside Mego recording artists. ~ Charles Spano