It isn’t a drone. The drone is there, sure, a background thing, like the surface noise of an old jazz record, or the dust in an underutilized chapel. But it’s just part, maybe parcel, but certainly not the whole thing. There seems to be a voice buried in the drone: a melody, snail slow and no less determined, plugs along, plowing through the thick haze. Shoegazer drone rock. Snailgazer. It’s a choral music where the score is a map of the torque of some massive structure in free space, shifting at a pace determined by a processing system overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the effort. Sparks fly, circuits short out. The sound is massive and unholy, gothic in its impact but downright rarefied in its implementation. This is “Atonement” by Guild. It’s one of two tracks on Ascension, the other of which takes its name from the album’s title, or vice-versa.
According to the brief liner notes, both tracks are the result of a bass guitar put through its paces: “drones effected, looped and processed.” Guild is a name adopted by Mark Midgley, who on his markmidgleyofficial.blogspot.com notes the association between his slomo death pop and the work of My Bloody Valentine and, more recently, Jesu. Midgley is a member of various bands, including Falconetti, Alt, and the Black Lanterns. Album released by the netlabel restingbell.net.
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 (