| Artist: Motion Sickness of Time Travel Album: Motion Sickness of Time Travel Released: 15 May 2012 |   |
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New things get old. But this has not been the case with electronic montage music. The artistic manipulation of sound seems to be continuing on very well since its inception among the works of Stockhausen and Varese. Rachel Evans recording under the name Motion Sickness of Time Travel makes a significant and pleasant contribution to this lineage with a self-titled double disc. Evans turns her small studio into a large force, continually combining and recombining a fascinating range of timbres into a variety of sonic textures and aural colors. As if saying that we are taking this journey together the four roughly 20-minute tracks on this release are obviously the products of experimentation, but are not completely random realizations. The music builds slowly and inexorably, into a torrent of sound - then drops away revealing soft synthesized tones or echoing word fragments. Better than the playback of frozen vocal samples throughout this work Evans provides us with layered singing. And an oh-so ethereal wordless human song it is that drifts across the celestial sphere of the listening mind. Motion Sickness of Time Travel offers something more than its avant-garde roots. Along with its unusual manipulations of sound, harsh synthesizer modulations and saturated tape effects there are even more passages of ethereal calm and beauty - allowing this work to stand equally alongside early albums by Michael Stearns or the more solemn pieces by Voice of Eye. Without a distinctive melodic narrative, very little in the way of rhythm and its overall expressionistic expansive feel Motion Sickness of Time Travel makes use of the fact that human perception is unstable. Missing many aspects of conventional compositions this listening experience often feels unteathered. Evans makes music appealing to the intellect as well as to the senses and seems from a bygone era - one where composers and musicians crafted original sounds and ideas and then spent time and effort organizing them in such a way as to stimulate a listener. There is another nostalgic element inherent in this music... optimism. It is performed solely because the composer's ideas are important; that it is done so well helps to preserve this musical art form.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 19 July 2012 | |
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