Reptile Worship – Formosa 3″ CDr

FTAM

Reptile Worship is just one of the many promising experimental artists to release content on Peter Woods’ FTAM label, an organization designed to give a home to Milwaukee’s avant garde and experimental community. With a strong Reptilian agenda motif, Formosa is a short release with hostile industrial tendencies and dark, bassy drones. With an ominous, crackling backdrop, the environment created here is nothing new but interesting indeed.

The textures presented on Formosa mesh into each other very slowly and tediously, making this release somewhat slow to take off. While the climax, presented in the middle as a harsh, whining, machine-like industrial drone, isn’t particularly spectacular or awe-inspiring, it works well and fits in perfectly with the other sounds. The overall tone tends to rise and fall, from a spectrum of subtle, crackling noise to a harsh whine to deep drones with whispers and screams rising out of the darkness.

While the ominous and esoteric tone fits the Reptilian control of society theme well, I can’t say that Formosa is particularly new or interesting. Some sections are better than others but as an entirety, the sound is fairly dry; not a whole lot of innovation to be had here. Not a bad effort, but leans too close to mediocre for its own good.

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