Menu

Motion Sickness of Time Travel

a1509834160_16

Motion Sickness of Time Travel, “If We Were Landscapes” (Self-Released, 2021)

There was a period between 2010 and 2013 in which Rachel Evans seemed like a universally celebrated and ubiquitous figure in the “experimental music” milieu, as she released a flurry of tapes and LPs on a variety of great labels in a very short span. Since then, she has embraced a considerably more quiet and homespun approach to her art, self-releasing a steady and increasingly eclectic stream of limited edition tapes/CDrs/art objects to the delight of fans like myself. 

This latest release is an especially divergent and ambitious one, as Evans rarely releases vinyl and even more rarely shifts her focus towards acoustic instrumentation or conventional songcraft. The latter deserves an asterisk though, as there is only one brief song lurking within these two longform soundscapes and it largely appears in submerged form, but it is still quite a good one regardless. 

While the appearance of that surprise song is very much an album highlight, it is just one part of a larger and wonderfully hallucinatory whole. In fact, If We Were Landscapes is strong evidence that the golden age of Motion Sickness of Time Travel is still unfolding and that Evans’ acclaimed run of albums like Seeping Through the Veil of Unconscious was actually just the tip of an expanding iceberg of future delights.

I am not sure how the vinyl or CD versions of this release sound, but something noteworthy about the digital version is that it has an extremely quiet mix (so much so that I actually punched up the gain with software). I mention that primarily because this is an album that demands some real volume, as one of its most wonderful aspects is how Evans fluidly and stealthily blurs and transforms her moods and motifs. 

The opening “Self-Portrait in Decay” is a perfect introduction, as slowly heaving cello drones blossom into a layered fantasia of backwards vocals, elusive violin melodies, and deep moaning strings. Initially, it seems like a faint transmission of a ’70s folk song is getting picked up by her amp, then it sounds like she is playing violin along with a lovely ballad on the radio, then it gradually emerges that Evans herself is the soulful balladeer. It is an absolutely gorgeous interlude and easily ranks among my favorite passages in Evans’ discography. 

Notably, however, that swooning crescendo does not impede the evolving mindfuckery one bit. The second half of the piece dissolves that song fragment into a shimmering haze of uneasy harmonies, reversed melodies, and a menacing host of darker, sharper tones. The following “Your Layered Silhouette, Unwinding” is similarly brilliant, as another reversed melody winds its way into a curdled orchestral nightmare, then gradually melts into a coda akin to a ravaged tape of an organ hymn. Both pieces are fascinating and complex plunges into vividly realized and darkly psychotropic soundworlds, which makes If We Are Landscapes one hell of an album.

Samples can be found here.

a4174216784_16

Motion Sickness of Time Travel (Spectrum Spools, 2012)

,

Although my initial enthusiasm for this project has been dampened somewhat by Rachel Evans’ deluge of similar-sounding releases, her ambitious and divergent debut for Editions Mego’s Spectrum Spools imprint demonstrates that she still has some tricks up her sleeve. While her characteristic layers of gauze-y, ethereal vocals have not vanished entirely, they are unexpectedly infrequent and rarely take center stage. Instead, this sprawling double-album plunges headlong into burbling, drifting, and subtly hallucinatory synth-based psychedelia and stays there for a pleasantly long time.

I am certain that it was no arbitrary or casual decision to make this album self-titled, as it has the definite feel of an attempted magnum opus. While I remain indecisive about whether or not this constitutes Evans’ zenith, these are definitely the most massive, deliberate, and complex compositions that I have heard from her. Well, aside from possibly the “compositions” part, as it is very hard to guess how these pieces originated. It sure seems likely that there was a lot of improvisation, editing, and rearranging involved though. 

That is not a critique—I merely mean that each of these four side-long (20+ minute) pieces is so shifting, vaporous, and amorphous that it seems impossible that Rachel could have fully envisioned and consciously executed the disorienting arc that each song ultimately follows. While I myself certainly can’t remember how most of these songs started by the time they eventually end, there are many oases of memorability and melody in between that sound very much planned, so some intelligent organization certainly occurred somewhere along the line. It is certainly an odd structure, but it works. Also, it makes sense when I consider Evans’ history of cassette releases, as some imagination is certainly required to avoid leaving blank stretches.

Because of the fluid, drifting nature of the pieces and the long running times, so much stylistic territory is covered that it is pretty hard to conclusively summarize or “like” an entire piece. I could probably do without some of the bloopier, candy-colored, golden-years-of-analog-synthesizer-homage passages, but they are easily balanced out by the alternately dreamy, sublime, breathy, or otherworldly passages that surround them. 

I was especially fond of the closing “One Perfect Moment,” which begins beautifully with a cool twinkling synth hook that is slowly consumed by warm chord swells and a somewhat damaged-sounding chorus of vocal layers. The fact that Evans’ voice sounds somewhat distorted and broken-up was especially unexpected and welcome, as one of my primary hurdles with Motion Sickness has always been that it is generally too muted and mannered to hit me on an emotional level. 

“Moment” corrects that and runs with it, morphing into a hazy drone stretch that becomes increasingly disrupted by washes of hiss and throbbing bass surges. It eventually loses a little momentum, but I can’t stress enough how much more moving Evans’ music is when its angelic tendencies are buffeted by harsher and more unpredictable textures. There are at least 10 perfect minutes in that song and that is a conservative estimate.

I did not expect to like this album nearly as much as I do, but it is weirdly endearing despite its bloat and occasional less-than-great stretches. Rachel took some significant risks, stepped out of her comfort zone, and managed to sustain it all for a very lysergic and enveloping 90 minutes. She even managed to paradoxically make bloat and inconsistency seem like virtues, as this album is best experienced as full immersion: were it any shorter, it wouldn’t be nearly so absorbing and the odd dodgy patch only serves to heighten the unpredictability and make transitions into the better motifs even more striking. 

This probably isn’t the ideal first place to start for anyone new to Motion Sickness of Time Travel, as it is both massive and not particularly representative of her past aesthetic, but “One Perfect Moment” might be the single best piece she’s ever recorded. For more seasoned admirers, however, this one is absolutely essential. It does have its flaws, but they are largely eclipsed by its vision, enormity, and otherness.

Listen here.

a2112339988_16

Motion Sickness of Time Travel, “Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious” (Digitalis, 2010)

,

I discovered Rachel Evan’s music in a somewhat roundabout way, as I stumbled into some music videos that she directed while I was searching for something else on Vimeo. As luck would have it, the first one that I watched happened to be one for her own project and I was intrigued enough by her blurred, melancholy multimedia vision to immediately track down this vinyl reissue of a long-unavailable 2010 cassette. Notably, Brad Rose has described that cassette as one of the best demos that Digitalis has ever received. It seems like a lot of people agree with him, as the first printing of this record sold-out before most of us were even aware that it existed (it has since been reprinted though).

One noteworthy aspect of this reissue is that it leaves off one of the six songs from the original cassette: “The Alchemical Dream,” a piece which sounds like the beginnings of a particularly ghostly Aphex Twin remix. While not a bad song, it doesn’t quite match the mood of the rest of the album, so scrapping it was a good idea. Removing an album’s weak spots for a reissue is a much, much better idea than bloating it with bonus tracks that weren’t good enough to be included the first time around—I hope this practice catches on in a big way (even though it was probably motivated solely by time constraints here). Another key aspect about this release is that it has one of the most apt titles ever: music does not get much more soft-focus, drifting, and blissed out than this. This record inarguably seeps.

Surprisingly, Evans originally began her musical career as a singer-songwriter, a vocation that she has successfully eradicated all vestiges of here: her vocals and lyrics are reverb-ed into oblivion and these five pieces are not structured in anything approaching a traditional song-like way (and she certainly never picks up a guitar). Instead, she constructs her soundscapes from her own multi-tracked, heavily processed, and unintelligible vocals. Unintelligible in a good/ASMR way, of course, as they swoop and whisper dreamily over an array of subtle synthesizer pulses and drones. That pairing sounds quite sublime in the twinkling and meditative opener “Clairvoyance,” which is one of the album’s two clear highlights. The other is the breathy and gently throbbing “Telepathy,” which manages to sound both drugged and sexy in all the right ways.

I also enjoyed the lazily burbling “Auto Suggestion,” but the other two songs did not connect with me much at all (particularly the 12-minute pastoral kraut-synth epic “Magnetism”). Also, as much as I enjoyed the bulk of this record, it never truly grabbed me: it feels like there is something important missing. Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious is pleasant and inspired, but as not revelatory as the buzz surrounding it suggests. I think that elusive element might be “personality,” but that sounds like a more withering statement than it actually is. Heavy reverb certainly sounds spectral and cool, but it also has a distinct tendency to strip most of the character from vocals: something else needs to fill that void. 

Rachel’s excellent videos certainly solve that problem beautifully, but her music definitely needs something else if it is going to hold up well on its own. Of course, it is possible that she has already figured that bit out, as the one song that I’ve heard from her recent split double-cassette with her husband (Nova Scotian Arms) boasts a pretty great understated hook that weirdly reminds me of Clock DVA. Regardless, Evans definitely has gotten the tough part out of the way: she has forged a very likable aesthetic all her own and made the world notice. Now she just needs to finish perfecting it.

Listen here.