***Excellent 1976 private press acoustic album, self-recorded at various places in Colorado, and filled with beautiful fingerstyle acoustic guitar, plus some atonal bottleneck slide, string scrapes and drones (at times, very Ry Cooder / Paris, Texas about six years before that soundtrack existed). Although almost completely instrumental, what lyrics there are tend towards the dark and the satiric. The obvious points of comparison are John Fahey and Leo Kottke, although Scott Key certainly has his own presence and style, differences in tone and color and attack, which he attributes to his background in rock bands. Overall, there is a brooding, loner folk/psych feel, most evident on the phenomenal, effects-heavy, almost 11-minute long title track, ‘This Forest and the Sea.’ CD version includes five bonus tracks from Key’s second private press album (Unlock Your Feelin’s) and a 20-page booklet. Deluxe 180-gram vinyl LP edition comes with an insert which sports engaging, funny, and insightful notes by Key, photos, plus the text to poem that inspired the title track, and is limited to 500 copies.