Harold Budd famously opined that he disliked new age music because "there isn't any evil in it." So it's a bit ironic to me that quite a bit of what's labeled "dark ambient" frequently comes off as evil new age, as if Vangelis found himself inspired after an afternoon staring at Giger paintings. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing - genre keystone Lustmord is just about the best haunted-house music a boy could ask for - but, you know, spades being spades and all that, I think a genre dedicated to the possibilities of sonic neurosis can be seen as the flip-side of sonic transcendentalism.

Formication is a self-described "dark electronica" duo from ye olde United Kingdom, and they fall a bit closer to the industrial side of the spectrum, along with the occasional stabs into glitchy IDM. This is both a good thing and a not-good thing. It invests Ghosts (Omnia Exeunt in Mysterium) with a mechanical menace; quite a bit of this sounds like evil Autechre, as if Booth and Brown were expressing the thoughts of Skynet rather than of spreadsheets and databases. On the other hand, it often leads the pair to mistake annoying for threatening, and results in lots of seizure-inducing noise ruining perfectly nice textures, as in "It Will Be As If You Never Existed." This track is a textbook for what much of the album does, so I'll elaborate. The music is nine-tenths fantastic, dripping with menace and possessed of that sort of space-filling breadth so important to ambient music of any ilk, but over top of it is this obnoxious, mutating, mechanically grating sound that can't be ignored. As the song goes on, this sound becomes more and more integrated into the composition, and it works, which is impressive - but for the first four or five minutes, it's just irritating. "Rotten Skull" follows suit, except here the annoying sound is a tortured and mutilated vocal sample. I could see this being somebody's cup of tea, especially if that somebody is into stuff like Merzbow, but I'm not that somebody. The intrusions prevent the music from ever creating the atmosphere it aspires to.

But, it's not all like that. Opening suite "Gathering the Storm"/"More Joy than You Could Possibly Know" is a compelling piece of "dark techno" (meaning you can dance to it), and the album's centerpiece - the 17-minute "All Hell and Despair" - is flat-out fantastic, pulling off exactly the balance of unsettling and calm required to earn its running time. I listened to it during a 1 a.m. car-ride through fog and rain the other evening, and it made me uncomfortable and nostalgic all at once. It's so good that it calls attention to how great the other tracks could be, were they not so focused on being harsh at the expense of being expansive. Some other tracks do follow suit, notably "The Unsound Light", while "The Mountains are Machines" is an effective stab at the sort of pulsating, menacing weirdness Richard D. James conjured up on Selected Ambient Works Vol. II but the annoying, jittery samples are never far off, marring closer "The End of Things" beyond all possibility of enjoyment.

And I can appreciate the idea. There are a million dark-ambient acts being spooky and remote out there, Formication is trying to do something to set themselves apart. In its annoying moments, Ghosts does sound like a fitting soundtrack to the meaning behind the band's name: the psychological condition of feeling imaginary insects crawling on one's skin. But gents, if you're reading this, take it from me, you do the spooky remoteness far better than most, and it's the best part about this album. More "Hell and Despair" next time, please.

-Lucas Kane