Thursday, August 25, 2011

Motion Sickness Of Time Travel - Luminaries & Synastry


01 Luminaries
02 Synastry
03 Late Day Sun Silhouettes
04 Ascendant
05 Athame
06 Day Glow
07 Moving Backward Through The Constellations
08 Eight Nineteen
09 The Walls Were Dripping With Stars
10 Like Dunes
11 Night

Rachel Evans left many listeners stunned with her debut album 'Seeping Through The Veil Of The Unconscious', released on tape and vinyl to pretty much universal acclaim at the end of last year. Her follow-up proper, 'Luminaries & Synastry' is a divine, subtly dizzying descent from the heights of that album, catching Rachel cocooned in a feather-like freefall to more pastoral climes without ever actually touching down to solid ground. The simplicity of instinctively layered, ethereal vocals and seemingly infinite arpeggios make for a mesmerising take on pop music, where the atmospheric composition contains far more nitrous oxide in a lower pressure system, and duly everyone floats about dazed in a state of post-rave/orgasmic bliss. This suspended sensation is unmistakable on opener 'Luminaries', those whispered vocals condensing around beads of glinting machine rhythms and convective synth swirls, precipitating the mood of things to come. Following this, 'Synastry' provides a poignant moment of clarity where you can almost make out whole phrases through the pillow of gaseous drones, slowing the systolic rate for the twilight glide of 'Late Day Sun Silhouettes' and the lambent organ glow of 'Ascendant' or 'Athame'. Entering the kosmische vortex of 'Day Glow' and ''Moving Backward Through The Constellations' the mood turns less blissed and more viscerally tactile, where creeping arpeggios envelope Rachel's haloed vocal in a tangle of bittersweet dissonance, before the gaseous glades of 'Eight Nineteen' opens out, eyelids fluttering, to the scenery of 'The Walls Were Dripping With Stars'. Sublime...www.boomkat.com

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