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Motion Sickness of Time Travel, "Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious"
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.
Evans began her musical career, rather perversly, as a singer-songwriter, a vocation that she 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 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 krautsynth 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 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 realized that, 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.
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