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Daniel Menche, "Bleeding Heavens"
Portland-based artist Daniel Menche deconstructs the organ and trumpet on this latest album, yet little of the resulting work reflects these instruments in obvious ways. Instead, these four tracks sound like mechanical insects mating with pink noise and then giving birth to an apocalyptic swarm.
The first track starts on the threshold of audibility, patiently creeping closer with an insidious bass rumble. Each passing minute adds further layers of scratchy drone while the volume slowly but surely continues to rise. Subtle pulsations and cryptic Morse code messages pierce the veil only to be overtaken by a stronger distorted signal that clears everything in its path until abruptly vanishing and erasing everything that's come before. Menche's adept at starting a track at one location and ending it somewhere altogether different, leaving listeners few clues as to how they had arrived at their final destination.
Starting more delicately like a piano on fire, the second track contains more obvious structural changes, yet these aren't completely cut and dry either. Alien rhythms vie for dominance with what sounds like a melting phonograph playing melancholy classical music, and it is this struggle between these two elements that gives the track its drama. The 22-minute piece goes through several phases, including a lengthy inhuman passage that sounds like appliances run amok, before it ends with a triumphant soaring drone.
The third track begins with an alarm dropped off the deep end of a pool of static that learns to swim its way to the top. As it reaches the surface, it is unmasked as a fiery klaxon conqueror, swallowing every last drop of static before it eventually dies of hunger. The fourth track also opens with a slow and quiet fade as did the first, but this time proceeds with inventive panning and guttural blurps rather than swollen dense layers of sound. The organ is more apparent on this track, like aurora borealis shimmering in the night sky and settling briefly into an interstellar sigh. Towards the end comes a droning passage that sounds like a church organist onboard a descending airplane. Rather than building toward a fiery climax, instead Menche closes it with a meditative ending that dwindles peacefully.
At times sounding like a building collapsing in slow motion or else a late-night swim at the bottom of the ocean, Bleeding Heavens is proof of Menche's uncanny talent for mutating common sounds into tracks that are dizzyingly unworldly. A tour of his universe is unlike any other and well worth the time and attention invested in attentive listening.
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