Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Motion Sickness of Time Travel (side C)

Rachel Evans has been active for about five years with her solo project Motion Sickness of Time Travel, releasing many cassettes and CD-Rs in addition to a couple of vinyl LPs.  2012 saw the release of her self-titled double-LP, which is divided into four side-long tracks.  While the palette is fairly consistent across Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Evans's approach to the sounds narrows further within each individual track.  The pieces evolve actively, with synth melodies, heavily-processed vocals, and abstract digital sounds changing constantly.  While the individual sounds change rapidly, the structural evolution of the pieces occurs slowly, with the melodic synths losing their movement or a vocal getting introduced only many minutes into a piece.  The processed vocals combine Windy & Carl's buried ambience and the harsh sonic textures of groups like the Skaters.  The sonic elements provide the compositional structures here, and they sound weird and digitally lo-fi.  The high frequencies often leap in front of the mixes — they're loud in volume and slightly brittle and distorted in timbre.  The low frequencies, which tend to act mostly as drones, feel a bit shapeless in both textural and transient details.  The compression that was applied, likely in mastering, to produce a loud vinyl pressing is transparent, yet it makes the transient detail in the mid-range feel particularly unnatural.  While the collages on the cover look particularly great on the thick reverse-stock gatefold, the jarring images feel darker in character than the flowing compositions inside.