Tuesday 15 May 2012

The 2kDozen 500: #180 - Motion Sickness of Time Travel, "Motion Sickness of Time Travel"

Oh, fuck; what am I doing? This is some seriously scary music with a quite scary title, the tracks are twenty minutes long and I feel like my immortal soul is under threat. I might not make it to the end.

"The Dream" is quite terrifying, not least because of a low, calm beep noise that keeps turning up. I fear that noise. It's used for something, but I don't know what - something involving film editing? A droning, Cold War, in-the-event-of-a-nuclear-attack beep; shit scary. And I'm only listening to it for the first time. Imagine spending hour after hour on your own in a dark basement with only the slowly building music for company, listening to it time and again until the thoughts move from the back of your mind to the corner of your eye. Yipes! There are human voices too - trapped in some wafer thin dimension where no-one can hear you clean. It ends with an echoey deep space laser battle.


A cheerier beginning to "The Center", the music talking quite happily to itself. And the voice sounds a little less trapped than on the first track; but it still doesn't sound like the kind of center I'd want to hang out in. The place sounds very haunted, by inventive and occasionally beautiful-sounding ghosts. I'm really not sure what to make of it. It sounds like it should be lovely, but I think I want a bit more drama or a bit more direction in the music. Eventually, about fifteen minutes in, the tune begins to move away from the centre and out into further reaches. I just want some propulsive bass to inspire me.


It gets a bit pan pipes on "Summer of the Cat's Eye", a bit Lord Summerisle. There's a pulse that shifts between a couple of frequencies to set some nerve or other on edge. Curious creepy music that I find myself associating with ancient BBC computers and sickness and time travel back to earlier sickness. The motion certainly seems quite lateral. I'm out of time and the fourth and final track will criminally go unexplored. A sneaky listen shows it building into a furious, howling Beelzebub of noises roughly halfway through with messed up piano sliding in and out. Too scared for that now.

Forgive me!

Rating: Threads out of Pulses

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