Jason Forrest

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Jason Forrest is an electronic music producer known for noisy experimental electronica and breakcore incorporating many ideas of mash-up and rock and roll. Largely produced and performed on a single computer (including live shows), his songs tend to be constructed from digital samples of found sounds and other artists' music. Until 2004 he recorded under the name Donna Summer, an allusion to disco singer Donna Summer.

In 2005 Res Megazine named Forrest's "Steppin Off" video, by director Jon Watts, music video of the year. In 2006 Res Megazine named Forrest's video "War Photographer", directed by Joel Trussell video of the year, and online magazinePitchfork also named it in their top 5 videos of the year. Both videos have won several awards at various international film and video festivals and have both been widely viewed, downloaded and acclaimed.

Forrest has released on many labels, but primarily on Köln Germany's Sonig record label. He also has releases on Irritant records (UK), Omeko (JP), MeWe le Disque (BE), Mirex (DE), Broklyn Beats (USA), and Hoss (USA).

Some of the more conspicuous samples of other artists to be found in Forrest's work include ones from Laurie Anderson, The Who, Supertramp, Steely Dan, Joe Jackson, Elton John, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Pat Benatar. This (along with his former stage name) shows his interest in appropriation as an artistic concept. Along with many images featured on the Cock Rock Disco web site it also shows his interest in recontextualizing popular culture from past decades.

Forrest grew up in South Carolina, has lived in Atlanta and New York City and now (Summer, 2005) resides in Berlin. He has a BA in Photography. He previously worked as a professional artist as well as an art critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution news paper.

Besides being a fan himself, there is no connection between Forrest and the pop music/disco artist, Donna Summer. In a 2003 interview with the CBC Radio program, Brave New Waves, he stated that by being a middle class white male using this name he was "subjecting people to a fake issue of diversity" and forcing them "to consider gender a little bit more."

1 Cock Rock Disco
2 Advanced D&D
3 Discography
4 External links

[edit] Cock Rock Disco

He created the record label Cock Rock Disco to release his own recordings in 2000, while living in New York City. For 3 years he self-released his earliest albums on CD-R, including "Rock Non Rock" and "Belligerent Super Vision", his first unreleased full-length. Then in 2005, Cock Rock Disco began releasing other artists including Duran Duran Duran, Drumcorps, About,the Assdroids and Dev/Null. The label has currently (as of feb 2007) 13 releases, and 6 12"-only releases.

A free full-length Mp3 album was made available in Dec, 2005 and remains online and free to download. To date it has been downloaded over 70,000 times.

[edit] Advanced D&D

Until recently, Forrest was also the host of "Advanced D&D With Donna Summer" on independent freeform radio station WFMU, where he continued to use the name Donna Summer after dropping it in relation to his own recordings. The show is still archived on the main WFMU website above.

Forrest says, "The show was primarily focused on unreleased new musicians. I tried to play as much CDR stuff as possible, and figure about 80% of eash show was completely unreleased." On his own web-forum he has maintained that he would like to continue with the show again in the future.

In 2005 He co-founded the Wasted festival with Dj Pure in Berlin, Germany to focus on exciting shows exploring Breakcore and related music. The mini-festival began in co-operation with Club Transmediale, and at this time (Winter 2007), there have been 4 versions so far.