Ducks Battle Satan

Yet another example of why Important is turning me into a slobbering, record-label fanboy. Daniel Menche is a recent discovery. The Wire had a bit of a write up on him a few months back and the description of what he did certainly pricked my interest. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the awesome Glass Forest and it was only going to be a matter of time before I dabbled again. I picked this up a  two weeks ago on ebay for no other reason than  that it was incredibly cheap (and still sealed!)

There seems to be a bit of a theme with Menche’s record titles. Consider some of these past titles, Bleeding Heavens, Beautiful Blood, Body Melt and Field of Skin. I have no idea whether Jugularis is representative of his back catalogue but for the  casual noise freak it has a lot to offer. Jugularis is a heavily percussive record and consists of three very long tracks (all called Jugularis) that are joined together without a break. It’s begins as an creepy ambient record (think of a more active Oren Ambarchi) before gradually building in intensity and changing texture over the next 20minutes.  The second track is an absolute cracker. Tribal drums are gradually digitally manipulated before being swallowed whole.  Menche’s use of percussive textures somehow build up a huge wall of noise without every relying on the hiss, squall and blast electronic fuckery of some of the other noise acts out there at the moment. There are noise textures throughout Jugularis but the focus is always on the percussion or some sort of digitally altered rhythm. It’s pretty good stuff. I’m keen to hear some of his earlier stuff which apparently delves into the dark ambient realm. Does anybody out there no enough about him to point me in the right direction.

This entry was posted on May 19, 2008 at 11:39 am and is filed under Daniel Menche, Music, noise with tags Daniel Menche. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.