REVIEWS

Buy this album from Amazon.com

Formication
Icons for a New Religion

Lumberton Trading Company

Posted: Thursday, October 18, 2007
By: Matthew Johnson
Features Editor

"Formication" is the sensation of phantom insects crawling over your skin. It's a good name for this UK duo; their music creates a similar sense of nervous discomfort, a vague dread of something that isn't quite there. The pair's new album draws on the Lovecraftian ambience of Coil and the bleak futuristic themes of Future Sound of London's Dead Cities to create a new future history; the liner notes imply that Icons for a New Religion is the tale of a future utopia, built from extraterrestrial knowledge and concealing a dark secret that becomes its undoing. Heady stuff, and in lesser hands it could easily have gone awry, but Alec Bowman and Kingsley Ravenscroft are new masters of the industrial soundscape. "Arise or Originate" begins things with an epic-length foray into layered bell tones, ringing and overlapping almost organically, while eerie manipulated voices mutter back-masked phrases over a pulsing dub rhythm. "In the Kingdom of the Electronic Eye" induces paranoia through tense synth tones, and "Dead Underground" builds on that feeling by echoing it endlessly through vast hollow caverns of reverb. "The Sufferers" is almost pleasant, despite its title, a minimalist landscape of subtle clicks and buzzing, evoking an alien yet somehow comforting landscape of nocturnal organisms, while "Minute" returns to more chilling territory with echoing beeps and creaks. Ending things is the two-part epic, "Faces of Fire," which starts as "The Frictionless Continuum" with melodic dulcimers and sharp-edged harp arpeggios, then fades into the deeper cathedral atmospheres of "Introspection," burying fragments of medieval hymns and muffled pipe organs in soft, silky layers of sustain. For an album so steeped in interstellar horror, it's an interesting note to go out on, an earthly reaffirmation of human history and culture, implying that the inevitable decline of the album's fictional empire is only a small part of a larger historical cycle. In any case, it's telling that this mostly instrumental album is easier compared to literature than music; while it's tempting to compare Formication to fellow dark ambient artists, it seems somehow more appropriate to recommend Icons for a New Religion as a background to reading tales of existential horror by Thomas Ligotti or the descriptions of fungal underground cities in Jeff VanDermeer's "City of Saints and Madmen."