(Experimental, Noise, Sound Art) [WEB] Daniel Menche - Bleeding Heavens - 2007, FLAC (tracks), lossless

released 12 June 2007
All music created and recorded by Daniel Menche. Mastered At Stereophonic Mastering
On June 25, Portland sound artist Daniel Menche rescued a Chihuahua dodging cars on a busy Oregon street. It was the day before Menche's blog, What Does Blood Sound Like?, turned a year old. It was also the last day the blog belonged to Menche. In six weeks time, Menche has posted 13 photos of the dog, now named Knuckles. Knuckles has blogged twice, lamenting that his new caretaker is "El Loco." "This Menche went to the store and bought some dog food and actually asked the cashier 'What do Chihuahuas eat?' and the store cashier responded 'Dog shit, you dumb shit,'" the Chihuahua reports. Knuckles has his own blog, too, and he's been the source of debate on anthropomorphism and anthropomorphobia. Blood readers were enticed to a Portland gig with the promise that Knuckles would be there, and Spanish electroacoustic pioneer Francisco Lopez even drew his portrait. On July 21, Menche posted a photo of Knuckles riding on his left shoulder under the subject "We are a team..."
It's this commit-or-quit, obsessive mentality that continues to make Daniel Menche one of the most vital and engaging artists in experimental music 14 years after his first release. Animality and Bleeding Heavens, two of the six releases he has announced for 2007, respectively restate his dual sonic fascinations-- processing simple beats into sheets of sound and taking long tones and fastidiously sculpting them into snarling, overlapping waves. Those interests were merged into last year's Creatures of Cadence-- arguably Menche's best release to date-- for the Crouton Music label, but here they stand separately with variable success.
In 2005, Menche-- long known for his work with corroded long tones-- began making a series of albums based on concussions, or the manipulation of phased, coordinated percussion loops sliding through one another. He had used percussion before, but, through juxtaposition, it generally worked to focus attention on his larger, arrhythmic movements. On Animality, as on the preceding Concussions albums, Menche stacks and displaces rhythmic patterns to create de facto long tones. That is, he gradually builds smears of sound from thousands of beats knocked from Native American drums of stretched animal skin. One 51-minute track, Animality is the stylist pinnacle of Menche's rhythmic fixation, as diligent as it is demanding. Largely for that reason, Animality is one of Menche's least successful recordings: It sounds passive because it's highly gratuitous. Even when the beats begin to bend together late in the track, there's little sense of lift or arrival. Animality never transcends its grand conceptual foundations.
Bleeding Heavens is much more accomplished, and it's also one of the thickest, most tonally perfect records Menche has released this decade. Composed entirely of processed trombone and organ sounds, it opens with a huge, solitary bass swell, expanding until it feels as if these wide, tall sound waves are pushing all the air from whatever space they're entering. New sounds happen: A wind-like squall strikes the bass. The next sound is almost a sigh, mitigating the shrillness as the low-end waves lift again. It all hardens, coated in metal, coming to a collapse 10 minutes later. By then, every sound is back, roaring. Each of Bleeding Heavens' four tracks starts relatively gently but ends in complete climax. That's only as predictable as the paths are unpredictable: Track two even touches on ambience, but, across 21 minutes, Menche assembles dozens of sounds and sends them into frenzied delay-and-reverse flux. On the third track, a wide wall of static covers an insistent high tone. Menche slowly pulls them together, letting each gradually reach a shared peak. On Bleeding Heavens, plan and execution sound synonymous.
Considered as a pair, these releases restate the Menche essentials: There's a strange level of emotion springing from his tracks, tones and tempos building into ecstasy or entropy, sometimes simultaneously. Furthermore, his sense of timing is dedicated and often impeccable, rarely lazy or rushed. Animality is the exception that proves the rule, and Bleeding Heavens shows that Menche is like a puppeteer nesting sounds like ornamental figurines inside one another. Imagine the bigger sound splitting at its midsection. As it starts to breach, the new sound grows louder and more apparent as the other falls back. It can be jarring and abrupt or careful and gradual, the audio equivalent of a novelist combining subplots and foreshadowing to make a long work unified. It's all about constant intrigue for Menche, unless it's not. - Grayson Currin, pitchfork.com