Band:	Indricothere / Geryon
Album:	Timelined Exterior [Collaboration]
Style:	Ambient
Release date:	January 01, 2021
A review by:	RaduP

01. One Hundred Years
02. One Thousand Years
03. Ten Thousand Years
04. One Hundred Thousand Years
05. One Million Years

Start 2021 off right: with a 2h long ambient album dedicated to MF DOOM!

Well, actually 1h52m, not 2h, but that's just nitpicking. In any case, much longer than most albums here, except the most ambitious ones (like Blood Geometry or Wanderers: Astrology Of The Nine). Needless to say, that's a lot of music. But I've heard longer ambient albums, even ones by Indricothere. Ambient music not being shy about its immense runtimes, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it does not, but in my Éons review, which is still the longest album I ever reviewed, I made a case for these types of albums, making them feel more likes rites of passages than everyday listens. But then again, who the hell has two hours worth of time to sit down and listen to some synths?

Well... don't sit down and listen. Read a book. Do some chores. Finish that project. Take a walk. Meditate. Unless you're really into ambient music looking to pick apart its layers, textures and compositions, a two hour long ambient album isn't something that really is going to be at the forefront of attention and offer the immediacy of an Alestorm song. Like a lot of music, you kinda have to be in the right mood and mindspace to enjoy it, otherwise it's just a boring slob of synths that go nowhere and don't end for the next hour or so. You wouldn't listen to Alestorm sober or expecting serious music. You don't listen to Sunn O))) if you feel like dancing. You don't listen to Daft Punk if you wanna sit down. You don't listen to Six Feet Under. So you're not gonna put on a 2h ambient record if the thought of it already makes you want it to be over.

Now that I made that point, I don't want you to see ambient music as just "elevator" music that you can just put in the background to increase productivity, even though you can do that. Daft Punk isn't great because you can dance to it. Daft Punk is great because it's great music, and you can dance to it. There's a lot of shitty ambient. It's pretty easy to make. Hell, I made some myself. Just stretch out some notes on a synth and voila: ambient. But it's not that easy to make ambient music that is actually good. Not only do you need to create an immersive soundscape, but you'll also notice that even though it doesn't feel like it, the music is moving. It's in no rush to get there, but there is something happening, a new synth line is added or diminished, some percussion is going on, whatever. You can't just randomly throw things in.

Timelined Exterior is a pretty good ambient record, disregarding the horribly cropped cover art, and it perfectly exemplifies what I just said. It started off as some of the bass drones from Geryon's Astomatous EP (which I kinda reviewed here) and repurposed with a lot of added synths by Colin James Marston, a name you might have heard by now. Ok, I usually do the background info before the actual review, instead of in the 4th paragraph, but whatever. Geryon is a bass/drums avant-garde tech death duo. Indricothere is the solo project of Colin Marston, that does either tech death or ambient synth works. All of these 3 people are in Krallice. If you haven't guessed by now, this album isn't tech death at all. But it is something that has been part of both bands' music. As I said, it is also dedicated to MF DOOM, which other that great artists appreciating great artists doesn't have that much to do with the album.

And now we finally get to the music itself, instead of using this review as a trojan horse to talk about ambient music (which might be better fitted for a separate article). Colin's experience as a produced has made him pretty crafty in terms of creating a soundscape best fitting for what he's going after. Though this is far away from the suffocating cacophonous sound of some of his releases, it's clear that the synth experiments of previous Indricothere records allowed some mastery over how to get synths to sound ethereal, but also on how to make just the right changes to whatever sound is going on, in order to sustain or shift the mood. He's not really crème de la crème, but he was able to make a 2h long ambient album that doesn't immediately fall apart. Though I wish there were more moments where you could recognize the bass that Geryon provided, the fact that it is so well integrated is probably a testament of how cohesive it is. The temporal orders of magnitude theme of the tracks works pretty well with just how transcendental this album feels, akin to a period of time beyond any man's reach.

And it's not like it was even the only ambient record released on the 1st of January, not even the longest one (the latter is a 2h30m Jute Gyte album, so it's also on Metal Storm).