Motion Sickness of Time Travel - Luminaries and Synastry

Let us take leave of our daily routine for a little while and walk to the top of a hill. As we look down upon the myriad lights of the city, feeling the evening wind softly on our skin, this is what forms the musical envelope we drench ourselves in. Motion Sickness of Time Travel is the work of one individual, Rachel Evans, from La Grange, Georgia. If you're caught off guard by an artist like this existing in the deep South, you're hardly alone. I was more than surprised to find not only this act but also an entire movement of lo-fi experimentalist entities who are building something truly remarkable down there. Ms. Evans mainly utilizes gorgeous washes of atmospherics and then buries what sounds like her own voice in the overflow of heavily processed and delayed analogue electronics. It'd be easy to dismiss this as shoddily constructed drifts of beautiful noise, and I'm sure many do, but to me there is nothing happenstance about what is going on here. The floating layers of rotary organ gives some of the songs on here an extremely dissonant tone.

She's done many releases under this name, I only noticed this one because it was featured on the Boomkat site and I took the plunge... literally. Telling entire tales through the usage of such minimal instrumentation is an art form unto itself, you can discern many feelings, times and places through what Rachel composes on 'Luminaries and Synastry'. I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that the title of this album is a play on the phrase luminous symmetry, it certainly sounds finite and finished to me. I wonder how long it takes to come to a point as a musician and realize when tracks like these have reached their completion. So much emotion smolders in what is on this release, it's terrifyingly gorgeous to listen to. Echoes of memories of moments, the webs encroach across the oceans of time and we're here yet again viewing the surroundings in twilight, just happy to see what we can see...

I suppose it's a bit obvious that the slowly evolving pace she chooses to use in her songs agrees with me quite well. There's the sound of moths blurred by a lonely street light at one point followed by the hum of a billion insect wings and then what could be a guitar soaring above the chaos playing out single, sustained notes which then degenerate into near feedback wails of discord. One never knows what turn it's going to take on 'Luminaries and Synastry' even with repeated listening sessions, the merest suggestion of melody teasingly lingers in each composition before disintegrating into wisps of tantalizingly sweet curls of sound. Organic applications of burbling synthesis compound the make up of what Motion Sickness of Time Travel do in the same manner the turning of Earth under a gnarled plowshare reveals substrata bursting at the seams with all forms of life.

This is audio sculpture, this is what the chisel brings out of faceless rock and hews into a visage which is remarkably personalized. Even though there are no lyrics, per se, there's quite a unique touch to what is going on here. One snapshot from a very unusual point of origin designed to give insight and draw you in. It isn't often you get to be whisked away on such a surrealistic voyage just by putting on a recording someone else has made, this is one reviewer who is loving what he's hearing. The terrain is spectacularly documented and the selection of minutiae will please even the most jaded of auditory pallets. Darkness may linger at the edges of what she does but it never takes over, even in the smallest of hours this is an outstanding example of sinuous intimacy given life through the medium of technology. Thank you for releasing this. Aug 03 2011