"What do we have here? Another Formication CD awaited with quite a big hope for its plot, as I was very satisfied with what I heard on Redux CD. Icons For A New Religion is the first album of two talanted artists – Kingsley Ravensoft and Alec Bowman that is not self released. Yes, talanted, because everything on the album is done by themselves – performing, manipulating and arranging all the instruments, designing the cover and booklet artworks, to say nothing about the idea generally.

Certainly there’s some special conception that lies under the whole album, but the cover and the music is so diverse in their meaning, that I guess each listener may have his own view, which is not bad in the end. Looking through the booklet and reading the texts, the story gave me louds of ideas. But the central theme of each was apocalypse, apocalypse that befell not only humankind in general, but also each human’s life separately. The evolution that inevitably leads to a fall that gives a start to a new world, that’s once going to fall again. Cyclic development of civilizations by Toinbi and Danilevky. Knowledge is what made them develop (but let’s not forget that knowledge can be of different kind). Music leads us through all the stages of development, it changes together with the world, from gloomy and mysterious times of ignorance and lack of knowledge when everything is frightening coz of being unknown and incomprehensible through the feeling of absolute awareness of everything happening around and to the destruction of everything created by using ancient knowledge and after discovering the truth about this knowledge and coming a new day, free from what once chained them of their own accord. There can be a deeper meaning – emergence of religion in the world and then nothing can be taken in consideration literally. Leaving all the truths their life was build upon for the “better” truths that are suggested as “absolute”.

Booklet pictures remind me ancient human’s drawings, although those are just pictures edited. Those pictures reflect feelings and thoughts of a human, the inner self. Colour is life. Colours and forms influence our emotional and psychical condition and therefore – perception. The colours are very appropriate and if I were asked to describe music with the help of colours, I’d definitely name those three – yellow, red and black. The music gives the feeling of fear, tension in atmosphere. The sound varies from crystally transparent and clear to viscous, heavy, vague, as if someone was muttering. Talking about genre I’d call it dark ambient mixed with clicks’n’cuts. Most of the tracks on this album have the common mood with the track The Victim from Redux – ritualistic, concentrated. Voice plays quite a big role in this release, without it compositions would be incomplete, not to mention that human voice is generally universal instrument. Also I cannot help mentioning the variaty of instruments used – here we have the range of instruments from well known for most of people guitar and piano to such pieces as djembe (African percussion instrument played with bare hands).

As ever, I’d like to mark out a few tracks – “Arise and Originate”, that is the longest one on the record and contains several moods, cosmic transparency is changed by mystic passages from dark underground, “diluted” by speech samples and vocals; “In The Kingdom of Electronic Eye”, that has a hypnotizing layer decorated with ornaments from electronic patterns of different kind and the voice, used as a separate instrument; “Dead Underground”, which I see as a continuation of previous track “In The Kingdom of Electronic Eye”; transparent “Faces of Fire (Introspection)”, embodiment of the New World."

Lets get the good stuff out of the way first- the album at it’s most effective when their sound is more slurred and hazy or stripped down of samples, as it moves towards the sort of grand darkness I think their trying to get. As dark bassy synth swell, pounce and ebb against minimalist beat patterns, or dark beat-less slides in eerier synth led cinematics and ritual technology fired dread. When it doesn’t work this comes off as rather a little dated mix of their influences you can hear traces of; Future sounds of London, The Orb and Coil, which just seem to have been audio regurgitated with little depth or originate. Stale and rather predictable american voice samples fly here, run of the mill beat patterns do thier stuff, as synth melodies play in a rather cliched manner.

So all and all some good ideas, promising textures and atmosphere at play they just need to develop their sound a little more and dump the dated elements and the frankly embarrassing samples."

Macabre storytellers Alec Bowman and Kingsley Ravenscroft emerge from the UK lab for another trippy excursion to the underworld in their latest Formication opus. On Icons for a New Religion, the group's first non-self-released work and issued, appropriately enough, by the Lumberton Trading Company (Twin Peaks anyone?), the sonic alchemists arrange eleven tracks into a sprawling, industrial-electronic narrative. The predictably cryptic text concerns the rebirth of a civilization after its return from the “terrifying edge of eternity,” followed by subsequent collapse and destruction—suffice it to say, not a parent's first pick for a child's bed-time story (a sample from the back cover: “ Those who survived carried their children into a hopeless time and laboured over the wreckage of their former glories and failed in every attempt to rebuild what was lost. Powers rose and fell and great wars and bloodshed and anger became the way of the world and over the generations the knowledge that those explorers wrought faded into lore and legend until eventually it even left their dreams.”).

Phantom voices moan, electronic rhythms churn, and textures mass into dense blurry masses in the 70-minute journey. The album opens in epic manner with “Arise or Originate,” a fourteen-minute, lumbering broil of backward voices, writhing howls, and tribal patterns. At some junctures, the travelogue's intense (consider the propulsive beats and acidy synthesizer snarl that churn during the eleven-minute “The Void”), but there are restful moments too (the comparatively becalmed “Minute”). The most arresting piece is “Faces of Fire (The Frictionless Continuum)” where Formication weaves brightly swirling lattices of harp plucks into an hypnotic, dance-like sway.

Think of what a Genesis P-Orridge-less Throbbing Gristle might sound like and you'll have some idea of Formication's hallucinatory style (strangely enough, one part of the sleeve's text even could be a reference to the recently-resurrected TG: “No one expected their return, yet here they stood again, older and more full of ancient knowledge than any had thought imaginable.”). If that's not evocative enough, imagine Icons for a New Religion as equivalent to staying awake for a chemically-induced three days and then getting lost, alone, in a pitch black, noise-infested forest at three in the morning.

Icons for a New Religion is the new album of the electronica sound wizards Alec Bowman and Kingsley Ravenscroft and this one reminds more strongly of the work of Future Sound of London compared to their previous materials. The ritual touch in the music also invokes comparisons with Coil as is most obvious in a composition such as ‘In The Kingdom of the Electronic Eye’ or ‘The Dead Underground’, while the intricate rhythm structures remind more of the work of Autechre and the ambient spheres of recordings of the well known ambient labels like Apollo or R&S in the 90’s. I had to think of the Isolationism cd compiled by David Toop, and released halfway the 90’s too, while listening to the alienating yet cinematographic music of Formication. Trippy sounds, buried voices, squelched beats, reverb and all sorts of deep drones and otherworldy sounds in compositions like ‘Arise or Originate’ or ‘Nest 4 (A New City)’ create a slightly alienating and threatening atmosphere. Caleidoscopic and dark is perhaps the most accurate description. With that you can’t deny mentioning Future Sound of London during the times of Lifeforms or Dead Cities. Icons for a New Religion is a worthy full length CD release, while previous materials were released on CDR. Professionally made though, such as the wonderful releases Redux and The Untitled Wasdale Recordings. Yet this new recording seems to be the most complete Formication release so far. Recommended to the adventurous lover of electronic music.