Leafcutter John (aka John Burton) is an experimental musician devoted to the crossbreeding of languages and instruments. This is evident also with Forester v 1.2, a software application for Mac OSX that comes with his fourth album ('The Forest And The Sea'). The 'forest' word refers to its silent protagonists: the trees. So it's easy to understand why trees are the conjunction between the album release and the software. They are the embraced metaphor to describe the application interface made out of circles popping at the center of the screen. The pointer describes the trajectories moving inside the forest (a clearly delimited space in the screen area), that are recorded and used to determine the music parameters. Forester allows to use any type of sound file. After uploading one of them, the user can start to play with it through the circles/trees interface and other more 'classic' buttons. The software is meant to create music sequences from the selected sound source, and the outcome seem to be made out of drones (that music composition based on the endless loop of the same note or tone). We can even properly define this software a 'drone machine'.
Vito Campanelli