Ducks Battle Satan

One of my resolutions for this year (read my only resolution)  is to start reading the booklets in records I buy. For instance I had no idea until I was having a bit of a cruise through Discogs that Menche made an appearance on Monoliths and Dimensions. DBS was never meant to be a fan site of any sort, it started as a way of trying to articulate noise and experimental records without getting too pompous about it all. But if you hadn’t picked it up by now, I am a fan of many of the bands that I post on here. Being a fan is different from being a band tragic because I think the latter term indicates someone who is passing a less than critical ear over the records they listen to. For instance I’m a bit of a Merzbow fan but to be fair his  output for 2009 was patchy at best and downright dull at worst. There is Prurient I love and some, you know, not so much. In the case of Daniel Menche I have yet to encounter a record I think is anything less than brilliant. I think the same way of Kevin Drumm but I’ll leave that for a later post. Menche has a wonderful drone quality to his pieces of experimental sound that are rich and rewarding. You know when you have really good wine and you get that amazing mouth feel. Well Menche is kind of like that for your ears. Take for instance this record from 2007 (which is a very fine vintage  for Menche indeed). The only hint as to  what you are listening too is a line on the rear of the digipak that says: Daniel Menche: Organ and trumpet deconstruction. If you can hear any trumpet over the four tracks of Bleeding Heavens then you’re either high or lying. I discovered a smattering of organ on the second track but that too was a bit elusive.What happens on a great Menche record is that his deconstructions become an electronic drone with static under notes, the drone evolves and changes not so much through the use of pitch but more through volume and intensity. Sometimes it evolves through the use of oscillations to produce that noise being blasted through a ceiling fan vibe. His sound is almost like layering sound on top of one another until the ones at the bottom are taken away over the course of a track  until it collapses. Although , its fairer to say that these tracks don’t actually collapse per se, they just cease to exist, no explosion, just an intensification of sound and then  … nothing. At times it is simply breathtaking. The first untitled track on Bleeding Heavens may be one of my favourite noise/drone tracks because it show just how amazing this sort of sound becomes when drone is so malevolent that it cuts a gash through the Earth’s crust. The second is a stunner that evolves in to powerful oscillations. The third is probably the least successful and doesn’t quite have the momentum of the other tracks but the final piece is a tremendous trip into  semi-dark ambient territory before gently sliding into the void. Amazing. This is as good as any place to get into Menche and I recommend that you do.

This entry was posted on January 6, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under Daniel Menche, Drone, Music, noise with tags Daniel Menche, Drone, Music, noise. 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.