Daniel Menche — Glass Forest

Glass Forest is Daniel Menche 67th release since his beginnings in soundart/ noise scene in the mid 90’s, it’s also apparently his last cd release as in future he plans to focus just on Vinyl and DVD releashers. This sits in the more ambient & percussive side of his material staying mostly away from the noise tendency of some of his work.

The release features three long twenty minute pieces and surprisingly for  Menche work he doesn’t list the original source or sources of sound here, I can only presume it’s glass hence the title and some of the tones found here have quite a glass like tone. Untitled one opens up the album with quite lulling drones that have a tone of distant jungle like drums as the piece progresses he builds up and manipulates tone in rhythmic rush and patterns of sound that are akin to a shaking table full of glassers, drumming textures and mass picking or scaping of glass- the sound is dense & full yet it never risers to true noise levels. It strangely mangers to be both rousing and meditative at the same time.

Untitled two starts with a map of smaller glass sounds and low down percussive elements and shifting Siren tones, bringing to mind loads of glass stems piling  up around you, It’s an odd yet strangle comforting and mildly hectic sensation. As the piece progresses he fills up ever existing space with-in the sonic spectrum with this piling on tone. At about the 5 minute mark a series of prodding and poking electro tones take centre stage briefly but soon get threatened to be covered with the piling tones once more. The rest of the track plays out a similar game with other tones fighting with the main pilling tone; also the pilling tone gets a little more violent and aggravated towards the end.  All in all an intriguing, rewarding and strange track and my favourite of the three.

Lastly we have untitled three which returns to almost jungle type percussive glass feeling of the first track, but with keener harmonic ringing tone running through it. The track has quite a haunted and lost feeling about it all, having a rather more harmonic and Mysterious tone running through out. As with the other tracks Menche shifts and builds different textures and layers of sound.

Another effective and enjoyable release from Menche that utilizes rhythmic, ambient and sound patterns to build his very distinctive sound worlds.