Recorded in Brussels in 2019, Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities is Timelash's second delivery of a four-album projected series. In their debut, A Morphology of Wonders (ZORN 060LP, 2021), the duet formed by Embassador Dulgoon (Nonlocal Society, Archimboldos) and Corum (Psychic Sounds, Million Brazilians) revealed a musical journey that they describe as a playful, dramatic, and scenic experience. 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 sound effects, strange body noises, bells, and bubbles ring under harmonic synth soulful crescendos, building up a sense of both machinery and wonder. There's a feeling of motion in several directions, sometimes even simultaneous, although limited, all of them equally full of meaning, since this is a coherent musical tale. 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 come forth pleasantly. Like fumes radiating from electric dreams, melodic layers drift, rise, and finally lay down subtly. The Great Nebula of Andromeda swims like a phosphorescent amoeba. Far away yonder in forbidden cities, foreboding creatures are planning to abduct us while we sleep. In the dark, we cook our macaroni and eat by lantern light. Stars cluster all over our table like fireflies. We watch the turning moon through our little telescope. The unknown stumbles around the dying campfire. As breaths gather firm, an auroral stain illuminates the sky once again. Great geometrical winter constellations lift up over sinuous iridescent gleams. We walk under the stars, our feet on the unknown round earth. Our eyes follow the lights of a deep glowing spaceship. Engine tones rise, shrill, faint, finally inaudible, and its lights go out in the southeast haze beneath the feet of Orion.

A
01. Stranger In Time 06:04
02. Primal Plateau 05:46
03. Outside Grottos Of Time 09:19
04. Sandrunner's Pass 08:49
B
05. Chalkwing's Floating Pagoda 04:36
06. Shadows Of The Skyfish 07:09