Beautiful was the Time just sort of falls into your head without much regard for your place in time or space, excitably extolling the benefits of finding yourself in the midst of a Slavic conversation. The words drifting half-complete are spoken in a language you cannot hope to understand, and the sounds somehow find a way to acquire a Cyrillic ambiance. Given the nature of this recording—sounds culled from found, borrowed, and purchased cassette tapes--it's only fitting that it would open with such novelty. Said cassette tapes were reconstructed, rearranged, recovered, returned and eventually re-recorded with the guidance of Preslav Literary School. The propagator of Preslav Literary School, a man named Adam Thomas, challenges listeners to find the structure underlying Beautiful was the Time saying of the endeavor, "I began to enter my own sounds directly onto the tapes, into the mechanism of retrieval. Before long I could not remember which were my sounds and which belonged to the original tapes."

The album opens with 'John the Exarch' seemingly midstream in an exposition on the merits of some long forgotten contentious issue. This clumsy start acts as a relatively accurate barometer of the emotions and reactions you can expect to arise while listening to the remainder of the album. There's something eerie about many of the tape loops that are spliced into the drone: a feeling of a time past that never even existed in the first place. Sometimes, you can even imagine the scene that you are hearing on the found recording: it's black and white and in slow motion and it keeps looping. 'John the Exarch' somehow seems on the verge of a breakthrough, even though it expounds the same aphorisms. Eventually, the conversation tails off and we are left with the remnants of the tape and a steady, haunting, lulling drone.

'Ohrid Must Die' introduces us to something like Morse code. The found recordings crackle on the surface of the rhythmic code, barely preserved and almost indistinguishable from the crumpling of paper or crunching of Fall's dried leaves under your feet, but that's what makes them most worrisome. Voices and birds join the fray for a moment before being obscured once more. It's as if these tapes captured the moments before a nuclear explosion. The sense of impending doom grows all around the deep bass that begins to follow in the Morse code's footsteps. Later, a news reporter discusses what seems almost certainly to be "the catastrophic events of the day." Even if you can understand the language, and even if in reality she's talking about gardening tips from Israel, the scene has been so thoroughly set in an entirely cinematic fashion by the incessant mournful drone that the actual words she speaks have little meaning beyond the tone of her voice.

'Cyrillic' confirms the suspicions of doom at the outset. Strings shriek and shiver like something out of a Krzysztof Penderecki composition and for a moment, you're reminded of the title of the album, Beautiful was the Time; and indeed, beautiful was once the time that has long since been forgotten. An airborn event of unknown qualities is discussed over radio, a decidedly evil entity bebops in the background, and an emergency is declared. The drone takes over from here as it slowly ascends to that once beautiful moment. We are left with a memory of happier times, an enjoyment of nature and embrace of our essential innocence.

Beautiful was the Time bears repeated listening. There are numerous indescribable sounds that weave their way into Preslav Literary School's gorgeous recording, and as with any complex music, you discover something new with each listen.