(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.

Formication