Fear of the Forest is a musical project started in London, UK in 2012 and fronted by Kate Arnold on hammered dulcimer, violin and vocals. The band combines influences from English and French folk, medieval, Renaissance, Middle Eastern and classical music to create a sound that has been described as 'punk baroque'. The songs draw upon folk and fairy tales, mythology, social history, dystopian doom, tensions between technology and humanity, and the strange tales of Kate's half-gypsy grandmother.

"The start of domestication, or taming of nature, is seen in a cultural ordering of the wild ... the female as a cultural category seen as wild or dangerous dates from this period ... The non-domesticated know that only the present can be total ... People are being stretched and beaten on the rack of everyday emptiness, and the spell of civilisation is fading ... the means of reproducing the prevailing Death Ship (e.g. its technology) cannot be used to fashion a liberated world ... The truly humanitarian impulse is that which is committed to relentlessly destroying the malignant dynamic known as civilisation..."

John Zerzan - Future Primitive

At least half of the earth was once covered by trees, particularly Britain and northern and western Europe. It is thought that western Europe has now lost over 99% of its primeval forest in a process that began around 10,000 years ago - relatively recently in human history - with the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering to more settled agricultural communities and the ensuing population expansion that would lead to urbanisation. The disappearance of forested landscape has really accelerated over the last few hundred years, with most of the loss occurring in the past few decades. With the exponential growth of towns and cities in the Middle Ages we became alienated from the forest, and began to think of it as a frightening place full of beasts and monsters. It became the setting for myths, folk legends and fairy tales; associated with outlaws, outcasts and outsiders, witches, strange happenings and madness; a metaphor for the darker regions of the human psyche. Humans may be descended from forest-dwelling ancestors, but as 'civilised' people we like to feel we have left the forest behind as part of a supposedly linear trajectory we call 'progress', which we identify with technological advancement and assume to be inevitable, but which is really an illusion. For Jung, the forest was a symbol of the collective unconscious; the archetypal antithesis of reason, potentially perilous. The forest is the place beyond our control, and it remains deep in our subconscious; it is part of us. It is the place where we have transformative experiences and encounter our real, and other, selves.

DON'T FEAR THE FOREST!