Feral Lands & Forbidden Cities

Recorded in Brussels in 2019, Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities is Timelash’s second delivery of a 4 album projected series. In their debut, A Morphology of Wonders (Aguirre Records, 2021), the duet formed by Embassador Dulgoon (Nonlocal Society, Archimboldos) and Corum (Psychic Sounds) revealed a unique musical journey that unfolds and expands like a cluster of organic matters and mechanical dialogues lit by iridescent fluorescences. Timelash’s musical proposal is firmly rooted in retrofuturism, reminding us of exotic and library music artists such as Martin Denny, Egisto Macchi, Bernard Fèvre, and Eric Vann, reaching up to Mark Dwane’s cinematic soundscapes, or Constance Demby’s Novus Magnificat
Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities digs precisely into what the title indicates: civilizations not yet explored, untraceable ruins, and the unknown. Digital synthesizers, samplers, flutes, percussion pads, and effects are assembled as stirring sprouts of life and evolutionary dream cycles. Spacecraft bustles, strange body noises, tolling bells, plasticine murmurs, and boiling potions ring under harmonic synth soulful crescendos, building up a sense of both machinery and wonder; the emotional significance that the mechanical contains
The tactile quality of detail and the flourishing motifs join and bloom in poignant, even epic manners, as in “Outside Grottos of Time”. A mood more dizzying and suspenseful speeds up “Sandrunner’s Pass” until the puzzling closing track “Shadows of the Skyfish” wraps it all up. Chromatic glares, mechanical abstractions, and multicolored visions emerge like fumes radiating from electric dreams; melodic layers drift, rise, and finally lay down subtly. There’s a feeling of mystery and motion in several directions, sometimes even simultaneous, although limited, all of them equally full of meaning, since this is a coherent musical tale