(09.13.06) Wandering in a dream landscape somewhere between the ritual ambience
of Coil and the electronic space drift of Tangerine Dream and Pete
Namlook, Formication culls together aspects of their back catalog to
create four long tracks of symphonic nocturnes for Redux.
During the organic evolution of live sessions, these tracks began to
take form — opening as portals into alien soundscapes, windows
through which alternate motifs and variations could steal.
“The Line That Divides The Earth From The Sky” is the shortest of the
four tracks, a nine-minute ballad of warbling synthesizers, aquatic
drum patterns and ghostly voices that try to channel opera singers but
sound more like specters lost in empty tin pails. Like a mist rolling
over water, “The Line That Divides The Earth From The Sky” is a
movement of fluid dynamics wherein nothing really takes hold and
everything has rounded edges. Quivering and chattering with digital
orthopteran noises and rolling in waves of purified noise (like
softened steel wool), “Rise Of The Native” is a symphony of locust and
grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, all making music in
simultaneous cacophony.
“The Victim,” dedicated to those who are locked in basements, is a
tympanic soundtrack to subterranean captivity. Drums with bruised
heads clatter like confused mental patients over an alien ambience, a
drone that gradually takes on more and more of a sinister quality.
“When The Patient Stars Breathe” is a retread from their previous
Pieces From A Condemned Piano and the warmth of the piano notes
have been transformed into squiggles of cold space noise, bursts of
alien communication that squirt off towards the edge of the solar
system’s heliosheath like a Rapoon-style transmission of shamanistic
ambience.
Instructions on the CD recommend playing the record on random and even
go so far as to list the track names in “no apparent order” so as to
facilitate the magical mystery of applied chaos to the work. As an
evolving ritual, Redux isn’t a permanent record as an aural
snapshot that can be further manipulated by the listener, opening
stranger vistas with every listen.
Redux is out now on Harmful.
