The Liminal Pulse of Travis or Alice’s Debut EP

Displacement creates a specific kind of tension. For Alisa Nedashkovska, the Ukrainian artist now based in Berlin who records as Travis or Alice, that tension became the raw material for her debut EP. Travis Goes Deep was written during her first two years as a refugee, and the music bears the marks of that limbo: a constant negotiation between what was left behind and what has not yet formed.

The short story accompanying the release speaks of “the boy within the girl and the girl within the boy,” a line that extends the theme of blurred boundaries beyond geography into identity itself. The EP opens with “Kyiv Fashion Week,” a title that nods to the real event held under the shadow of war. The track moves fast, its electronics undulating under vocal samples that are chopped and abraded, as if the music is trying to define something that keeps slipping. The question it raises is not about fashion, but about presentation: do we dress how we feel, or how we need to be seen?

“Happy (Sophu8)” channels an industrial pulse that feels absorbed from Berlin’s club orbit while remaining distinct. The EP’s structure reinforces its themes of dichotomy by including two versions of “Spysh?” The original builds on gnarly sub-bass and shifting textures, the sound of a dial-up phone ringing with no answer. Ukrainian producer Na Nicht strips the track back on the remix, presenting a bleaker, sparser reading.

“KRYCHY!! (SCREAM!!)” arrives as an outlet for frustration and frantic energy, a piece designed for crowded floors where individual distinctions dissolve in volume. By the time “Idols/Outsiders” closes the EP, the arc is clear: a search that does not resolve neatly, but finds its footing in the act of searching. Nedashkovska has described herself as existing “between fear and the rush of becoming,” and this debut channels that in-between state into something approaching a document. Creation, here, is how a displaced self presses back.