Esbie has taken sounds from the widely praised subterranean documentary Undercity by Andrew Wonder and turned them into what she terms a “pseudo song.” The end result, which she titled “Undertracks” (get it?), has the elements of a song: beat, mood, and vocals, though the vocals aren’t sung, or rapped, but instead are comprised of select statements by Steve Duncan, the urban explorer whom Wonder tracks in his film.
Trains are a near constant in music, pop and otherwise: as sonic influence in the pacing of the blues, as metaphor in works ranging from Elvis Presley to Steve Reich, and, of course, as sample. Esbie’s response to Wonder’s film suggests itself as kind of souvenir. You can only watch the documentary so many times, and in so many settings, but should you have a hankering for it, this song serves as a compact and evocative, and respectful, memento.
Speaking of being respectful, it also serves as a meta enactment of copyleft creavity. Esbie reminds us in the brief liner note to her track that Wonder owns the copyright to the work she has sampled — but, of course, his documentary was a literal act of creative trespass.
Track originally posted by Esbie (aka Sarah Brown) at soundcloud.com/esbie. More on the Wonder-Duncan video at vimeo.com.
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 (
Static means different things to different people. The surface noise of vinyl. A programming error. A cable disconnect. Interference from a cellphone, a crossed signal. To some musicians, all of the interpretations, all of the guesses, are crossed signals — and to these musicians the static is yet another thing: a compositional element, one that itself signals a consciousness of the intrinsic failure inherent in technology. It can ring of nostalgia (a sonic palimpsest, the Ghost of Data Past), and it can suggest what’s yet to come (message seeping in from the future). In the case of Gastón Arévalo, the glitch is matched, in a track titled “Agreste,” with a lulling sensibility, a marshy, singsongy slow wave that neither suffocates nor is irritated by the glitch’s spiny presence. That balance is the track’s major accomplishment, and the source of its pleasure: