Castle If (Jess Forrest) creates an analog synthscape as the futuristic backdrop for her latest recording, Sector 03. Inspired by William Gibson’s 1984 sci-fi novel Neuromancer, Forrest conveys an anxiety about technology as she examines a future in which disorder is magnified. Throughout the album, her electronics twinkle and throb with an air of worry akin to that of Y2K panic. The track “Sector 02” ends with what sounds like the logo theme for the THX Sound System trailer played before movies. The world of Sector 03 may be fictitious, but the dread that Forrest conjures feels all too real.

The energized electronic beat that Forrest threads through the first four tracks of Sector 3 feels like the nervous thrum of a cityscape. On the album highlight, “Running Through The Sprawl,” Forrest morphs an initially affable synth-line into an anxious theme. Halfway through the track, in which the pace increases steadily, we hear Forrest panting, exhausted from the chase that has just begun. In the second half of the album, Forrest expresses the desire to escape the world she has built. “Take me far away from this,” she sings on “Sector 02.” And then later, with her voice masked by a vocoder, she demands “a new operating system.” The closing track, “Sector 01,” is a waltz to the end of days—or perhaps a waltz to welcome a strange new world. Over an eerily playful melody, Forrest softly and directly says to the listener, “There is a way out,” adding, “You know how to get there.”
 

We are, for now at least, still in control of our future.