Formication - Agnosia download free

The English Formication has been reviewed here before with "Pieces For A Condemned Piano". Agnosia is their new outing (quickly following up on their previous release "Icons For A New Religion") and is a novelty for the net label Dark Winter in that it is their first release which is also offered for sale as a limited CD. Where the previous "Pieces For A Condemned Piano" impressed me outright, this album shows a very different side of the artists. Partly this is due to the dissonant character of the sounds used. It is not so much that the used sounds are harsh (as the palette is actually rather warm), but that the manipulations used on many of the sounds, a sort of delayed echo, gives them a rather stuttering character. The short span of the album (five tracks in 32 minutes) in combination with a bit of an incoherent character overall left me rather perplexed the first few times; exactly WHAT was it I have just been listening to? Subsequent listening sessions improved this picture though. The first two tracks still do not quite captivate me, but the second half of the album delivers a warmer sound which is not altogether unpleasant. Especially the fourth track sounds like a condensed version of the masterful 45-minute fourth track of Jean Michel Jarre's "Waiting For Cousteau". I would recommend this album to lovers of ambient and other electronic oddities. But do not be surprised if this album does not reveal itself to you immediately. - Originally written in Dutch for IkEcht, English translation by the author)