For a song about the philosophical implications of theoretical physics, there are a lot of cats in the video for Lunchbox’s “Evolver.” That is only as it should be, for whatever their esoteric inclinations, Donna McKean and Tim Brown are unapologetic about their obsessive love of all things feline. The video is also full of vintage pix and vintage gear from their over-stuffed basement recording studio. If nothing else, Lunchbox has always been relentlessly DIY. The video came about when Donna dragged Tim to see the dBs reunion show at the Chapel. Fandom rekindled, Tim stumbled upon Josh Parrett’s astonishingly cool dBs video on line, and was amazed and delighted when Josh agreed to do one for Lunchbox.
Lunchbox’s legendary lost album Evolver is lost no more! Sparklingly remastered for the album’s twentieth (and a few!) anniversary and available on CD, cassette and (for the first time) vinyl, this psychedelic masterpiece fills a crucial hole in the band’s discography. Recorded in the couple’s 1990s Oakland basement between stays in Berlin, tour dates in London, and dreamy sojourns up the rugged Mendocino coastline, Evolver fuses jangle and jungle, ambient and dub into a striking pop statement.
Marrying refined songcraft to the serendipitous magic hidden in half-broken reel-to-reel tape decks and vintage synthesizers, the Evolver plants its pop flag on the terrain of magic and mystery. Dreamy jangle pop gems emerge seamlessly out of a sea of loops, drones, and dubbed-out horn fanfares, cascades of tape echo feedback and whispers from outer space providing a trance-inducing backdrop to the pop sensibility for which Lunchbox is well-known. Hook-filled and hypnotic, Evolver is a sublime slice of post-pop psychedelia that you won’t want to miss.
For this special and long-overdue reissue we’ve raided the bands vaults for three previously unreleased tunes that add extra dimensions to the album’s uniquely trippy flow. And for the vinyl heads we’re pressing this as a double LP for maximum fidelity and playability, including a vinyl-only fourth side of beats, loops, interludes and puzzling aural ephemera, all taken directly from the original master tapes.
More context / background from the band’s Tim Brown:
Evolver is a product of a distinct time and place, or rather three places: the pre-gentrification Oakland Rockridge neighborhood, where Donna and I lived in the so-called “Shafterhouse” with its basement studio, in walking-distance of crucial trumpet-friend Jeremy Goody who lived around the corner; the Mendocino coast up around the town of Gualala, whose rugged, slightly-spooky coastline was (and remains) an irresistible attraction for us (and was the source of all Donna’s photos for the cover and insert); and the city of Berlin, Germany, where we lived in the mid-late 1990s during my graduate research, indelibly stamped by post-Wall underground club culture and the crumbling beauty of a city we were haunted by and are still in love with. We played a number of Berlin shows, including one in the legendary techno-squat Im Eimer, a fairy-light lit crumbling former slaughterhouse with a giant hole in the top floor through which the band could look down into the rooms below onto an all-night Jungle dance party. Like playing inside a UFO.
The Evolver moment in time—right around the year 2000—was similarly a product of three influences: I was in graduate school at Berkeley and had a ton of time to work on records in the basement instead of writing my dissertation; we had been doing a live band since 1995 and were sick of the restrictions imposed by having a band, especially by the straightjacket of turn-of-the-century West Coast indiepop, with its pro forma sounds and gestures; and it was also—so I was informed—the moment of a rare astrological transit related, for me, to some kind of psychedelic awakening. Basically, Evolver was conceived and recorded in kind of a low-level acid trip, infused with a strong feeling that everything was alive and connected, part of an indissoluble whole. Those three time-related factors added up to a sense of freedom—Evolver was the first and last time that we really made a record just for us, with no concern whatsoever with how it would be received.
The sense of freedom was also bound up, crucially, with technology—Evolver is first and foremost a product of sounds that came out of specific pieces of equipment piled all around the Shafterhouse basement: a 1971 Micromoog; an array of Teac 2 and 4-track reel-to-reels; a barely-working Japanese Vestakaza RV-1 Reverb (impossible to find again, I’ve learned); various Electro-Harmonix boxes; and above all, two keyboards: one, an Everett home-market console organ that had keypads that not only made the dreamy Maj9 chords heard all over the album, but produced chord progressions that we would never have come up with on a guitar or piano; the other was a Mattel Optigan, a kids’ keyboard from the 1970s that used primitive optical sampling technology to reproduce the sounds of guitars, or pianos, or whatever. We had a full set of the flexi-discs containing the samples, which you inserted through a slot where they were read by a light sensor. Happily, you could also put the records in upside down, making the samples play backwards.
Other than the Everett and the Optigan, the most important basis of the recording process was the tape decks themselves. We recorded mostly onto a Tascam TSR-8 8-track, and a little onto a TEAC 3340 4-track. But the biggest feature of the decks was the tape delay you could get out of the various two-tracks we had sitting around. The whole record is steeped in tape delay: this is where a signal goes out of the main deck into a second tape deck, and the distance between the record and playback heads (and in dependence on the speed of the deck) produces a delayed signal that then comes back into the board. If you then send that signal back to itself, all sorts of fun stuff ensues, the decks serving as instruments in their own right, producing squalls of noise or deconstructive dubscapes.
In keeping with the spirit of the place(s) and moment, the machines kind of literally told us what to record, and we just sort of obeyed. The influence of drum ‘n’ bass, imbibed during our Berlin sojourn, as well as during our late-1990s run of London shows, is clear on the record. Also clear are shades of dub reggae and the dreamier side of indiepop. But we really didn’t strive to be one thing or another—we just tried to realize what was being given to us. It was easy, like surfing a wave. It will never be that easy again, that magical again, but we’re incredibly fortunate to have Slumberland Records come along to release a Twentieth Anniversary edition of a record that never came out on vinyl like it was supposed to and was basically lost. Now, it is found, and we couldn’t be happier.
SOURCE: Tim Brown (Oakland, CA, Winter 2025)
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