Thursday, May 17, 2012

Kief with Rachel Evans (Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Quiet Evenings)

It is an absolute honor to chat with Rachel Evans, kief-style.  Whether it is with her own project, Motion Sickness of Time Travel, or the blissful duo with her husband Grant, Quiet Evenings, Rachel is making some of the most beautiful music today.  The pictures below are only a small sample of her prodigious output.  Recently, Spectrum Spools released the incomparable Motion Sickness of Time Travel self-titled 2xLP.  Easily one of the finest of 2012, it is full of "Def" sounds - sounds that make you feel.  Throw a healthy dollop of kief on that bowl, fire it up, and blaze on with us :)











Glorius Bubba Kush Kief from fellow smokehound, Fadedfools!  thanks for the good vibe and peace to you, bro :)


1) The diverse range of sound and ideas over four sides of vinyl coalesces impressively. Could you please talk about the process of recording this beautiful release for Spectrum Spools and your inspiration(s) for this record?

Rachel Evans: I started recording material for the 2xLP in early 2011. Initially I approached it the same way I've approached most of my other solo releases, which is sitting down with my gear for an hour-ish at a time and recording layers on top of layers of myself direct-in. I got a few "finished" tracks out of this, but since I had so much time to work on the album I just kept recording more for it. Throughout the process I decided to record some longer "live" one-take tracks.

One of those takes became the C-side of the album, and is one whole piece. I was really happy with it and liked the idea of longer, side-long tracks for album, but I was still really attached to some of the shorter tracks I'd recorded before and after that. So in January of this year when it was time to decide what was going to make the record, I did some post-editing and turned the other 3 sides of the LP into "suites", mixing the shorter tracks together. I really wanted the album to have a more continuous flow to it, without excess silence interrupting in between "songs". I was really happy with the side-long "suites" approach so I stuck with that as the final version of the album, and gave each side it's own name. 

As far as inspirations for the album goes, my husband Grant had just bought me the "Promethea" books by Alan Moore around the time I started recording music for the LP. In a weird way it's sort of my soundtrack to my own Promethea-esque tale. The D-side title "One Perfect Moment" comes from that series of books. About the time I was finishing up the music for the album I was reading Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" (another book Grant suggested I read!). It was also a big influence... the A-side title "The Dream" comes from that novel. I had a couple titles in mind for the album itself when I started recording it, but by the end of the whole process I ended up going with a self-titled album. I'd never done that before and it just seemed right... nothing else seemed to fit better than that. There were a few other inspirations for the album too... I was listening to Grant's solo music (especially his double tape, "Winds Over Silmäterä") a whole lot during the time that I was working on the bulk of the music for the album. Also cats. Cats inspire so many things.

2) The label that you and Grant run, Hooker Vision, has started the year wonderfully with many great releases. What can fellow sonic travelers expect from the label in the future? Will there be more vinyl releases?

Rachel Evans: Right now we've got a Sparkling Wide Pressure LP in the works, and some more tapes too, including a Spectrum Tickets cassette.

Our upcoming Hooker Vision tape batch, due out the first-ish of June includes a new Aloonaluna tape, a Merryl tape, a Crippling tape, Grant's first solo tape under his own name, and a new MSOTT tape.

3) What kind of records/sounds are you diggin' currently?

Rachel Evans: Probably one of my favorite records we got recently is Phurpa on Idealogic Organ. So good... Also I never get tired of listening to Grasshopper. And the new Discriminate tape sampler with Inez Lightfoot and Night Lite is amazing. I especially love Inez Lightfoot's side, perfection!

4) What does the future hold for MSOTT and Quiet Evenings? Are you participating in any other projects?

Rachel Evans: We have a handful of shows coming up for Quiet Evenings! We'll be playing Gainesville, FL this Thursday (May 17) as part of the Pedestrain Deposit tour. Then Atlanta, GA May 22 with our good friends Villages and Merryl as a part of their tour, and then Asheville, NC on June 2 as part of Aloonaluna and Roamer X's tour (also with Villages and Merryl on the bill). We also just got word that Quiet Evenings will be playing Voice of the Valley this year on a 905 tapes side stage. And later in the year we'll be playing the Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh, NC. Quiet Evenings also has an upcoming LP on Aguirre Records, due out this summer! And a handful of splits in the works with Grasshopper, Former Selves, and Afterlife.

I have a new tape coming soon as MSOTT on our own label Hooker Vision, called Chinaberry. It features some brand new stuff as well as a couple tracks that were cut from the 2xLP, and will be out the first week of June. I have another tape coming soon to Sacred Phrases that also features some tracks that didn't make the 2xLP cut. And in February 2013 Grant and I will both be playing solo sets at The Stone in NYC on February 1, and on February 2 Quiet Evenings will be playing The Stone too, along with Afterlife! As far as other projects... I've had a split/collab 7-inch in the works with Lunar Miasma for some time now. That's still on my to-do list, along with doing some vocals for some Emuul tracks. Grant & I are also planning to move out of GA this summer, so that's a huge thing too.


peace to you, friends :)