Inhabiting a murky, future-primitive electronic world akin to some of Coil's best work, Formication blends opaque ambient passages with mutated, unnatural rhythms that carefully straddle the line between formless chaos and repetitive, occasionally almost danceable beats.
It's on tracks like "Solus Air & the Dream of the Heart Star" where the two structural opposites blend together perfectly, with amorphous ambient passages interspersed with erratic, but catchy distorted beats.The chanting voices and disorienting electronics convey a ritualistic feeling throughout.
"Slow Man – Personal Insults" falls more into the world of chaos, with disembodied voices and sputtering rhythmic elements careening together in a dense, heavy mix that has a sense of tension that’s almost tangible.The effect is even more pronounced in its sequencing next to "The Girls Spun Round in Fear," which is far more sparse and arid, even if it does have the sensibilities of an updated Blade Runner soundtrack. While it's not light in the conventional sense, it at least allots some breathing room.
I was most entranced by the pieces that fell more into the world of conventional electronics.The solid, pummeling techno beats of "Silver" are part of a track that is structurally pretty simple, but with an array of sounds that make it more captivating than it would seem on the surface.In a similar way, the fractured take on the Chain Reaction type sound that closes the album on "Absolute Will" makes for a great ending:it might not do anything out of the ordinary, but what it does, it does quite well.
While there are a couple tracks, like "I Had a Plastic Head that Melted" and "Dr. Umens May Care," that aren't all that memorable, the bulk of this album is a fresh take on electronic music that varies between dark drone worlds and dance floor oriented beats, two genres that are rarely paired together.
Early copies are packed with an additional CD-R remix EP that features Hoor-paar-Kraat stretching "Argentum" out into creepy space, Locrian making "This is Normal for Me" even more bleak than the version that opens the main album, and Formication themselves contributing "I Dare You," a beat oriented track that is great on its own, but would have been out of place on the main album.It's worth the few extra bucks for the remixes, that’s for sure.
samples:
- Solus Air & the Dream of the Heart Star
- Nightly Instructions from the Cracked Telephone
- The Girls Spun Round in Fear
 
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