Daniel Menche — Flaming tongues

Flaming tongues seems the perfect title  for this album, as it seems to surround you on all sides, with flaming percussion layers, that in the longer tracks seem to suck you in deeper and deeper, often as the flames die away, your left with ambient like looped smoke trails, like be pulled down  endless corridors of flaming  and smoking doorways.

The really clever thing here is the element of tone change, Menche pounds you again and again with looped patterns, be it banks of rhythmic collisions or static chitter chatter or sun seething ambient receptiveness, then just when the loops burned into your mind he changes tack, starting another element or stoping all together. You often feel like your trailing through a desert of sound, your feet parched, your legs aching from the repetition, which is also somehow inviting. For me the longer tracks like the 20 minutes, second untitled track works best- which has almost an audio magic eye quality to  it’s tribal earthy drumming layers, the more you Concentrate on one element the more elusive and endless it seems, so one is unshaw quite were it’s going or what your hearing, the deeper you get into the track the more it almost seems like the air you breath, you ponder if it stops, what will happen?. Simply put wonderfully hypnotic, trance inducing stuff. The last track almost feels like  your stuck inside  a plastic cubeoid and looped rain sound keeps pounding down on the thin outer membrane, that surrounds you. As the rhythm  streaches and bows at the edges, admit satisfying croaking or electronic mumbles, that jutt out from the outer edges of the rhythmic downpour. You almost feel if you step outside of it ,you truly will be soaked to the bone.

This is my first experience with Daniel Menche work, and I can safely say it won’t be last. 70 minutes of textured sound to spring board into and cascade over and  over ,in its repetitive rhythmic hues.