The Mercury Program - "Nazca Lines of Peru" from the CD From the Vapor of Gasoline

While I don't think that the Nazca Plateau is home to any erstwhile landing strips for alien starships, I can sure understand how its eerie, arid and isolated windscape might just facilitate the imagining, at least among our more suggestible and our more visionary, of just such a series of fantastic runways.

I think that The Mercury Program might be some of those doing this imagining, actually, visualizing the primitive starport as it might have been 1500 years ago, an anachronism nestled like a piece of engraved platinum between the hardscrabble Andean foothills and the Pacific Ocean.

The band's music is nothing if not evocative, often spacious and always multilayered. Early on in "Nazca Lines of Peru," it's only Dave Lebleu's marvelous syncopated drumming that separates the tune from minimalism, all you hear is the buzzing of the bass and of the wind, all you see are the high white clouds sailing by. Later on, a webbed hand switches the starjets on, and the guitars roar, as the chromium gullwing of the alien ship disappears into the cerulean blue of the Sechura Desert sky.

And then, as quick as the hummingbird whose wings magnified 10,000 times are etched into the rusty landscape, it's only the echo of the wind and the vibraphones again, the Nazca tribesmen listening as the breeze blows across the lonesome plateau, watching the seasons change, waiting for the 20 minutes of rain each year, drawing another geoglyph onto the face of the desert every generation or so, waiting for the starships and the frogmen to return.



The Mercury Program - From the Vapor of Gasoline - 04 - Nazca Lines Of Peru.mp3

192 kbps mp3, up for 6 weeks (Right click and save as target)

File under: Postrock songs named after UNESCO World Heritage Sites