For the first seven minutes and fifty seconds of the track “Unconscious Listening III” by Gutta Percha, it’s all murky noise, the gentle creepiness of industrial industrial music. But a second later, at 7:51, everything changes. A true oldie pops up, like someone flipped a switch on the radio. It’s ballroom nostalgia, dancing cheek to cheek, but the signal is marred, either the band caught in a time slip or the vinyl record left out in the rain. The melody is indelible, even if it is forced to stop and restart repeatedly. Percha manages to have it both ways, to treat the listener to a great song, and to mark it up, to deface it (MP3). Each act has it’s unique impact: the antique pop song a surprising thing to surface, not only on an album largely populated by noise music, but midway through song; the marred rendition a reminder of the inevitability of decline.
Track originally posted as part of the album A Crawlspace Companion at the netlabel Test Tube, at monocromatica.com/net label. More on Gutta Percha at myspace.com/gutta-percha.