Motion Sickness of Time Travel –
self-titled double LP
(Spectrum Spools)

Staunchly ‘experimental’ music fans liable to find themselves bored and annoyed by the faithful reiteration of electronic musicks past might be well-advised to approach Rachel Evans’ prolific recordings under the MSoTT name with caution. For those of us in the ‘ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ camp however, her stuff remains a solid sender, with these four side long tracks adding up to her biggest, most consciously ‘ambitious’, musical statement to date.

For Side A (perhaps knowingly titled, ‘The Dream’), we’re in pure Tangerine Dream territory, no apologies offered. Two silvery synths at work, one holding down a clean, sustained drone whilst the other tinkles across one of those bleepy-bloopy little note patterns that’ll make those of us raised in the ‘80s instantly think COMPUTER. The tone here is futurist – not post-, not retro-, just completely straight up, like Vangelis and Jean-Michael high-fiving as they look over the Tokyo skyline.

Until you drift back into consciousness a few minutes later that is, and realise that suddenly it’s all desert….

Before digging into these LPs, it’s helpful to read up on the methodology Evans used in constructing them, as elaborated in this interview with The Quietus. Basically, sides A, B and D were assembled from the kind of shorter pieces that have featured on her previous records, threaded together into twenty minute ‘suites’ in time-honoured ‘70s fashion. Side C – ‘Summer of the Cat’s Eye’ – meanwhile is a one-take live improvisation, and maybe that goes some way toward explaining why it’s my favourite track here. Not that the other sides aren’t great too of course, but ‘..Cat’s Eye’ is really something, by-passing the kind of snidey “sounds like..” comparisons used earlier in this review for a really engrossing trip into the unknown, steady tremoloed signals crashing headfirst into waves of chattering chaos and unknowable space-voices, like original series Star Trek unexpectedly drifting into a Tarkovsky-esque realm of terrifying alien beauty. So that’s pretty good.

As to the other tracks, the whole ‘suite’ concept seems the like kind of thing tailor made to annoy the hell out of me, given my general distaste for stop/start dynamics and liking for distinct, self-contained pieces of music, but in actual fact it works pretty well, to the extent that you probably wouldn’t notice the methodology if not informed in advance. The run-off from each ‘bit’ is nicely calibrated with the rise of the next, further building the established mood rather than upsetting it. Gradually, contrasting layers and textures fuse into odd and engrossing new patterns, successfully diffusing the whole shoddy ‘been there / done that’ comparison biz that each side's opening minutes may evoke, as is demonstrated when ‘The Center’ (side B) kicks off with a wonky organ pattern straight outta Terry Riley circa ‘Poppy Nogood..’ - obvious to fans of this sorta thing perhaps, but it becomes less of an easy touchstone as soon as the volume of Evans’ wordless sunrise-in-the-desert vocal line rises like a shapeless city on the horizon, and the track takes off on a different journey entirely.

There is a kind of hermetic purity to Evans work that I think really sets her apart from the potential tedium of the ‘mystic synth explorer’ aesthetic. I may have thrown around plenty o’ names in the paragraphs above, but the truth is that there is absolutely NO “he he, yeah, Tangerine Dream dude” type intent going on here. It sounds instead as if she’s simply sitting down in front of her gear, taking a deep breath and firing it up to make some wide-screen, expressive music, the way it naturally comes out, filtered through the technology, not defined by it – and the celestial depths scraped by the results speak for themselves.

Labels: album reviews, late night listening, Motion Sickness of Time Travel