Deep Forest (Deep Forest album)

Deep Forest
Studio album by Deep Forest
Released	1992
Genre	World music, ambient, dance
Length	46:49
Label	550 Records
Producer	Dan Lacksman, Guilain Joncheray
Deep Forest chronology
Deep Forest (1992) World Mix (1994)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[1]
Melody Maker	(favorable)[2]
The Philadelphia Inquirer	[3]

Deep Forest is the first studio album by the musical group Deep Forest, consisting of French duo Éric Mouquet and Michel Sanchez. The album mixes New Age electronics with UNESCO field recordings of music from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, Tibesti, and the Sahel. Deep Forest was nominated for the Grammy Award as Best World Music Album in 1994. For Sanchez and Mouquet, the most important purpose of the album was to express their own fascination with the Efe people, and open the world's ears to the exquisite sound of a quickly vanishing culture. As Mouquet noted, "It's not very often you can hear a Pygmy singing on the radio." Although some critics have gone as far as to argue that this purpose was never realised, for no Efe, or any Pygmy people featured on the album or any of its samples,^[4] samples of Pygmy music have indeed been used for the album albeit in a limited degree. The songs “Sweet Lullaby,” “Hunting,” and “Night Bird” feature three samples taken from the albums “Cameroon : Baka Pygmy Music” (1977) and “Polyphony of Deep Rain Forest - The Music of the Pygmy in Ituri” (1986, CD Ethnic Sound Series, vol. 4).

More than 3,5 million units were sold worldwide.^[5] The album went gold in the US, France, platinum in Australia, and gold in the UK. The songs "Sweet Lullaby", "Deep Forest", "Forest Hymn" and "Savana Dance" were released as singles, the first two of which became hits worldwide.

The album currently remains out of print, due to copyright and attribution disputes over the sampling of music from indigenous peoples. Though a percentage of the profits from sales of Deep Forest goes to the Pygmy Fund, a California-based organization committed to helping the natives of central Africa cope with environmental threats to their homeland, it has been noted that the indigenous groups featured on the album would not be assisted by the Pygmy Fund^[6], and that tax returns submitted by the fund did not show a significant increase in donations.^[4]

In 2005 Joni Mitchell included two tracks from this album, "Night Bird" and "The First Twilight", as related to her musical development on her Artist's Choice CD.