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CD Feature/ Daniel Menche: "Radiant Blood"

  Tobias

If art immitates life, then Daniel Menche must be a poet living next to an industrial compound: His methods are subtle, his arrangements refined, his textures however torn apart and his sounds ragged and raw. “Radiant Blood” is a perfect illustration of a music of irredescent intensity, vociferous volume and lyrical deepness.

For sure, it is equally close to noise and the industrial genre as it is to the dulcet atmospheres Drone Records has become famous for. On the other hand, this label has always insisted there are as many interpretations of “the drone” as there are talented musicians out there and Menche certainly knows how to weild the axe. If you expected the “Substantia Innominata” logo to stand for a New Age-kind of spirituality or a transcendental hyperlink to a meaning outside of our reach, then allow this 10 inch vinyl (which needs to be played at an unusual 45 rpm) to proove you wrong. On the A-side, a shredding tone lingers aggressively in the heart of the frequential spectrum, rotating like a dental drill over a periodontosic jaw, moving constantly, twitching like tortured sinews and bristling with anger. In its aura, body- and weightless spherics fill the vacant spaces, lifting the piece into a sedated and feverish nightmare. The flipside is more concrete, but not a bit less assertive: Rumbling and rambling piano notes come crashing in, played by an epileptic droid in a fit with his fingers detonating on the keys. On top, radio scramble enters and leaves at will, leaving ghoulish traces on the kirlian camera. This is a record about the “unknown” and in direct consequence, it seeks to distort and blurr. Its point lies not in using what noone has ever heard (after all, how could it?) but in integrating the unlikely to acchieve the unthinkable: Meditation through movement, silence through sound, calmness through ruction. And yet, all of this is no big mystery - Menche is not a magician, he is a craftsman with golden fingers and it seems to be his firm belief that if there is a higher truth, it can and must be attained by the objects and powers of our direct environment.

So it is back to context and its various effects, possibly the driving force behind most of the more experimental releases in the Drone Sector. Which is no bad thing by any means. To use a metaphor from a similar domain: “Radiant Blood” is like a granular sheet of sandpaper, wiping the mental screen clean and opening it up for new input. And if you thought that an industrial compound can not serve as an adequate source of creative energy you better get your history straight – Gustav Mahler spent his youth next to a soldier’s fortress.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Daniel Menche
Homepage: Drone Records