Zeitenwende is a difficult album to review. Well, to be honest, it pushes the very definition of the concept of album. It is eight very long ambient pieces that clock in at a total of 340 minutes. That's right: this "album" is almost six hours long!

The artist who made this musical marathon is Earlyguard, a German ambient composer named Thomas Frühwacht who has been giving away music on BandCamp since 2010. None of his other releases stretch quite to this extreme length though.

This is minimal ambient electronica. Keyboards tinkle, synths whoosh, and occasionally a recognizable sample wanders by.

The most recognizable sample that stood out to me is, i think, Herr Frühwacht's cat, who adds some "vocals" to part 2 of this album. I know that there are other songs with parts i recognized over the tinkling, whooshing haze that is the music here, but that one stood out to me because when Frühwacht's cat vocalized, my cat, Miss the Brigid, suddenly jumped up from where she was asleep on the couch and began looking around for the other cat who had dared intrude into her home.

So, aside from irritating my cat, this is interesting droning music. It requires a lot of patience to get through, and works real well as ambient music in the background.

If you are not into ambient, then Earlyguard has nothing to offer you. If you like mellow music that sits in the background and provides a nice sonic underlayer to your activities, then Zeitenwende is a pretty good choice.

And it is free! Download it from BandCamp. Now that i think about it, this kind of long-form ambience really has to be a download. Each song is too long for a vinyl release, and if he put it on CD most tracks would have to be on a disc by themselves, due to length.