Out of stock
CD
Daniel MENCHE
“Dirge”
Daniel Menche has yet again utilized a piano to create a vast and immense storm of noise and drones. In 2011 he created a piano noise album titled “Guts” that was the sound of a piano being violently attacked and then electronically treated. Ten years later Daniel Menche worked with a grand piano that was in tune and located in a very acoustically sound studio. With carful elegance and care Daniel Menche wove long horse hairs in between the longest strings of this grand piano and bowed the strings for several hour to create massive amounts of overtones, drones and noise. Edited, mixed and subtly treated, “Dirge” is presented in a rather raw manner. The bowing acoustic movements was the main focus to the music rather than the electronic making this a unique recording in the ever growing discography of Daniel Menche. “Rawest Dirge” is a bonus track only on this CD release that is the raw recording of several objects placed on the strings with tone generators resonating the strings. “Rawest Dirge” is presented raw without any edits or treatments. “Dirge” was a very physical recording to make and therefore an album that truly needs to be heard physically loud and deep as possible.
Daniel Menche : Bowed Grand Piano and Noise
Recorded at the Hallowed Halls studio in Portland Oregon.
Great gratitude to Peter Drake who assisted me wit hthe creative recording process of the grand piano.
Recorded throughout January 2021
Mastered at the Stereophonic Mastering.
11,00€
In stock
LP
Daniel MENCHE
“Primal Fictions”
“Primal Fictions” may sound like the early work of a literary novelist, but words are not Daniel Menche's chosen form of expression - instead, sound and noise form the foundation of his 30 year dedication to abstract sonic exploration. “Primal Fictions” (LP) released by Ferns Recordings is a prime display of Menche’s unique approach to field recordings and electronic manipulation. An earthly marriage of the acoustic and electronic worlds, “Primal Fictions” is a stunning example of Menche’s immersive and overwhelming music, one that invites the listener to become lost inside a vast sound forest. 200 copies.
19,00€
In stock
LP single-sided
Daniel MENCHE
MMXX-05 “4424”
Matière Mémoire presents the MMXX Series. In anticipation of the year 2020, Matière Mémoire asked 20 great artists to create an original 20 minutes piece and an artwork. Throughout this year, each quarter will see the release of 5 new vinyls, available individually or as a bundle. Each record is limited at 500 copies and comes as a crystal clear vinyl featuring an original track of 20 minutes on one side, and a laser engraved artwork on the other. Each contained in a transparent sleeve printed with the MMXX logo, and each coming with a print of the artist artwork.
Original price was: 25,00€.12,00€Current price is: 12,00€.
Out of stock
LP
Daniel MENCHE
“Melting Gravity”
Daniel Menche follows up his triple CD opus Sleeper with the razor drone constructs of Melting Gravity. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, Menche is an iconic musician with three decades working with intense noise, immersive ambience, and turbulent field recordings. With Melting Gravity, Menche continues to carve his spot as a figurehead in the experimental community.
The title of Melting Gravity refers to an allegory on the human pursuit of transcendence with all of its connotations to weightlessness, ascension, flight, out-of-body experiences, and just getting high. Gravity, on the other hand, becomes that which negates and nullifies those transcendent pursuits. In the context of this particular allegory, gravity is the devil. Music, long a vehicle aimed towards transcendent ideals, becomes the weapon to defeat gravity, to defeat the devil. Daniel Menche wields the weapon of music in composing the mercurial grandeur that is Melting Gravity.
Implementing an elegant arc of acceleration and dissolve, Menche presents a slow-motion tumble of drones from his signature manipulation of FM synthesis, oscillators, and sustained tones from various stringed instruments. The tangles and tendrils of these extended frequencies are bright and liquid, rich in harmonic complexities though mottled with a scrap metal discord. Menche balances these slippery, luminous overtones with a dub-inspired lattice of recursive bass tones. Read as an industrial mantra or as amplified minimalism, Melting Gravity stands as an exemplary work in Menche’s storied catalogue of recordings.
Daniel Menche’s lengthy discography contains over 60 albums, many of which have been published by some of the most esteemed experimental record labels. Over the years he has worked with Editions Mego, Sige, Touch Music, Alien8 Records, Ash International, Utrecht Records, and many others. He has collaborated with Mamiffer, Andrew Liles, KK Null, John Wiese, Aaron Bradford Turner, Joe Preston, Anla Courtis, Zbigniew Karkowski, Kiyoshi Mizutani, and Kevin Drumm. He has performed extensively in North America, Japan, Europe, and Australia.
- Jim Haynes
20,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Daniel MENCHE
“Vilke”
Vilké: of Lithuanian origin, a word for the female wolf. An avid and voracious hiker, Menche found great inspiration in the beautiful lament of howling wolves during his overnight expeditions; and ultimately chose these sounds as the core sonic elements for Vilké. By layering and distending wolves voices, a choir of howls was constructed - a massive sound wall colliding with layers of poly-rhythmic drums, abstracted guitar and piano.
“(Menche) eschews classification as a noise artist, and while many of his techniques suggest similarities to musicians who work within that realm, he works within specific structures, with a meticulous sense of the relationships between sounds and the overall development of a piece”- Dusted
“(Menche’s) honed style thrives on subtleties, crescendos, sublimation, and locomotive transformation. One can easily become immersed in his web of carefully sculpted sound hip-gnosis.” - Tiny Mix Tapes
“...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.” - brainwashed.com
“(Menche) eschews classification as a noise artist, and while many of his techniques suggest similarities to musicians who work within that realm, he works within specific structures, with a meticulous sense of the relationships between sounds and the overall development of a piece”- Dusted
“(Menche’s) honed style thrives on subtleties, crescendos, sublimation, and locomotive transformation. One can easily become immersed in his web of carefully sculpted sound hip-gnosis.” - Tiny Mix Tapes
“...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.” - brainwashed.com
24,00€
Out of stock
3 CD
Daniel MENCHE
“Sleeper”
Daniel Menche is best known for his assemblages of visceral, industrial-
strength noise. In such head-rinsing recordings as Vilké (2013), Deluge (2003), and Fields of Skin (1997), Menche’s compositional directives instigate and exacerbate the physiological properties of anxiety -- increased blood pressure, blurred vision, claustrophobia, panic, disorientation, etc. In the hands of a talented composer such as Menche, noise can be demonstrative, cathartic and even communal. But after three decades of intense relentlessness, Menche posed the internal question: “Why the hell do I gravitate to compositions that stresses people out?” In re-evaluating his own compositional strategies and philosophical stances, Menche worked out the ideas through sound. Out of that research came the makings an ambient record that he could fall asleep to. These recordings seek to amplify the re-imagined traces of light and dark across the inner eyelid of the dreamer caught in that crepuscular moment between wake and sleep.
To peg this album as merely an ambient record is to do Sleeper a gross disservice. This a Menche ambient record. Feckless new age drivel, this is not. While seeking a graceful tranquility and placid states of mind, Menche’s compositional tools remain the sonic equivalent of a chainsaw. Rough edges and bold gestures are steadfast reminders that Menche is at the helm. In Sleeper, Menche plunges into the harmonic dissonance and glassine minimalism found in the historical works of La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine. Never one to be static, Menche drapes his ephemerally half-melodic loops and unfurled sonic tapestries onto a distant, iron-clad thump as a rhythmic spine. The ghostly frequencies that flare out of from his drones almost always evolve into sharp and blinding coronas of sound, embruing the album with an unnerving tension.
An opus at a third of the length, Menche’s Sleeper is a monumental album of colossal driftwork clocking in well over three hours.
3 CD edition of 500 copies, housed in a custom printed tri-gatefold stumptown printing CD jacket.
18,00€