Genre: Dark Ambient / Electronica
01 Arise or Originate
02 (this is madness)
03 Nest 4 (A New City)
04 In the Kingdom of the Electronic Eye
05 Dead Underground
06 The Sufferers
07 Caesura
08 The Void
09 Minute
10 Faces of Fire (The Frictionless Continuum)
11 Faces of Fire (Introspection)
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.
