Motion Sickness of Time Travel Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious. I just read an article or two about the conflict between elites as the champion of "high" culture and the undeniable yankee spirit of contempt for the elites by championing of middle brow or "low" culture. I wasn't convinced. Except of course when they discussed the fact that all best movie, best record, best book lists are nearly identical, a random reassortment of rankings is all that divides them. Well except for the ILX best records list because I haven't heard of most of the things that have appeared on it thus far. But I am not interested in indie rock or black metal. The one article seemed to champion the american ideal of "contempt for contempt", I believe that is how it was put, but I would put it down to laziness. One article was in the Guardian and the other was in Chronicle of Higher Education. One lambasted popular consumers for not challenging themselves and the other applauded the lazy for setting the critics straight. I haven't seen "The Social Network", I bet it isn't great, mostly because Jesse Eisenberg is in it and I bet he plays young billionaire as fidgety, blinking Lightning Bolt fan, the same as in all of his movies. I've only seen one other of his movies. I am making a fool of myself. I know. What has this to do with Motion Sickness of Time Travel? Nothing. I haven't seen it appear on any best of lists. I did see that Sarah Kirkland Snider appeared as third best record on Textura.org. Bravo! I have picked up loads of exciting things because of Textura.org. Things like Twine. This is the sort of record that might be praised on Textura.org. It is filled with long songs, repetitive figures and charming wordless vocals that evolve to a vaporous coo of tender thoughts. First track is soft, unobtrusive, a bit shoegazey. Second track has begun a bit more insistent on the programming, static and brutal ambience. The wordless, well there may actually be words, one would need an aural microscope in order to make them out within the mix. Words are unimportant. It has a chant-like quality, she isn't chanting but the movement in and out of the mix remind of the child sucked into a television in Poltergeist and the intermittent quality of her communication from the netherworld is duplicated nicely. I know even less about Motion Sickness of Time Travel than I did about Saturday Looks Good to Me. Did you know Betty Marie Barnes is in Sweden now? HAs she married a Swedish pop star? A swedish footballer? Is she modeling Swedish footwear? Unknown. Motion Sickness for Time Travel is one person, female, a student. This could be her dissertation on isolation the amniotic sensation created by the record is conjuring seraphic images, elusive and distant, perfect. I could make a record like this. I always type that. But really it is a repeating pleasant sound and her voice processed through eleven layers of reverb. I could do this. if I had ambition to. If I made my vocation my avocation, as Robert Frost once demanded, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. I read books for work. I read Xenophon. I have read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, what better manual for organizing a corporation and exhibiting entrepreneurial zeal could exist? This record feels like the next logical step for Cloudboy. This is the record Demarnia Lloyd would have made the next time she spent a month in a grain silo. I am almost certain of this. So really it could come disguised next Halloween as a Demarnia Lloyd solo record and we would all be convinced. It's a dream. It has been unfathomably cold today. Our workforce was shrunken considerably due to this and so I was able to play music at work at more reasonable volume levels. I did not play this. I played Kort. I played Jonny. I played the Love Language. Everything about them radiated warmth. This record sounds more like the emptiness of space, the stillness of absolute zero even as it causes my senses to flutter about because there is more going on than one would first discern. Is it a dissertation on the need for meaning in human existence? I have finished half of To The Lighthouse and I am in love. The idea of writing a book from the point of view of each of the main character's unknowable thoughts is brilliant. Perhaps I only believe this because I live nearly all of my own existence inside of my own head. I don't display and signifiers to the world at large. Am I happy? Am I sad? You would never know. Not that anyone desires to know. The inside of my head could sound a lot like this record. Now more wordless breathiness and guitars??? and ambience. The empyrean force that envelops all o the tracks here. Her next record might really be amazing. Sometimes you can sense that songwriters or sound recorders have an innate sense of likability in that they are able to create things that are instantly pleasing to the ear. The doofs on ILX would decry this as sentimentality or earnestness but this is a gorgeous listening experience. Or so I would opine. There was one point in the Chronicle of Higher Education piece that hit me between the eyes and that was the refusal of many people to say whether something is good in any larger context other than subjective experience because we lack the capacity to describe why something is good or at least why something is better than some other thing. I laughingly disparage my inadequacy when it comes to assessing music because I don't know anything about music. This is purely an emotional website. I record my emotional reactions to records and do not attempt to extrapolate those feelings into any larger sense of objective truth. I wish that most music criticism would flow from the same motivation. I am not ever convinced by anything Pitchfork writes. They lack gravitas, sure, the lead review tomorrow could be written by an 18 year old who wants to tell you about why you should vote for Olivier Besancenot in the next election for President in France while also insisting that Spoon is the greatest thing ever. Is there a more soul deadening band than Spoon? Probably. But my reaction to a Spoon record is sheer diffidence, I can't imagine having a strong opinion on them either way. and this record is hardly revolutionary, it is static and whirrs, it is not unlike the new Seefeel record in that but there is a human warmth that permeates everything even through the wires and circuits. How it is that some electronic music conveys this and some electronic music does not is probably explainable through music theory and simple deductions but the moans and dissonance coursing through my headphones at the moment seems like basic, primal emotion created the same as a painting, the same as a poem, or a soliloquy by Lily Briscoe. Are all Virginia Woolf books this brilliant? I had only read Orlando previously. I will read them all now, of this I am certain. Especially since when I tried to find more books on the Levellers I was dismayed to find that copies retailed at several hundred dollars. How will I read the Putney Debates?! Online? Ugh. Track now is Magnetism and it has morphed from a cacophony of human emotion to the gentle rumble of a warp reactor, the chiming repetition of a Frigidaire, the rapturous calls of a Gray whale. Very Nice. Second to last track now. Auto Suggestion some things more closely resembling notes in the introduction. More spare, narrower, more intimate until the gradual accumulation of momentum. Artificial birdsongs, a bird feeder with nine volt batteries attached, a garden symphony on an October morning. All of the tracks have a smoothed out simplicity, it is very Sonic Boom in that. Vocals have arrived, more ethereal still. A very long track this. Why dod some bands make exceedingly long tracks such as this and others write short pop songs? Does the nature of this sort of drone music lend itself to duration? Is it an attempt to mesmerise by the repetition of simple musical phrases over and over, the reversion back to secure notions of childhood lullaby. I don't know. That was my attempt to sound pretentious. Now rain song. The sky pouring forth, a baptism. As I said, or as I meant to say, this music fits the weather. We are very near to absolute zero at the moment. It did not reach above 0 degrees fahrenheit today. Cheers. It is on evenings such as this and when listening to beautiful records such as this that loneliness seems a less than viable option. As I worry about pipes freezing and the thin layer between life robbing congelation and my dream life I wake always alone and always plagued with melancholia. It is cold enough to freeze human blood, to turn the soul stirring animus to crystal dispassion in a moment. This music has turned my meteorological ear to poetry. Last track, more disjointed, again very Seefeel. How excited she must have ben to have finally heard a new Seefeel record. I've listened to the new Seefeel record. I prefer this record to Seefeel's new record. I prefer Succour to this record. More coos and babels. Could I make a track similar to this? Possibly. I went to graduate school and many are unaware that my first website on Geocities was a disaster on 'How to Construct a Time Machine'. I know, rather unimaginative of me to appropriate a bit of Alfred Jarry's glamour for myself. I never did get around to making a time machine or to wearing a holster with loaded pistol but I did talk a bit about shiny bicycle handles. This is an odd track to end on. I would have reversed the order placing this Ch-Vox'ian atmosphere as second to last and the previous bit of extended bliss as the record's final farewell. I wouldn't change anything else. The end. Unplug.