Daniel Menche – Static Burn

“Constructions created with crude analog and digital treatments of tortured electronics, destroyed voices, raw materials and one old forgotten song.”

For this task, I decided I wanted to dig into one of my favourite Electroacoustic albums so that I already had that familiarity but can apply new ideas I learnt to, as well as giving myself a good excuse to listen to the remaster on Menche’s bandcamp. Daniel Menche is mostly recognised as a Noise artist because of his disregard of volume ideals and focus on intensity, but always had a distinctive style that seperated his work from his contemporaries at the time, as the 90s noise scene (especially the American scene) was known for being extremely full on “confrontational” noise all the time, whereas Menche’s work was focused on a different kind of expression entirely that used noise more as a catharsis for his passages of brooding dark ambient focused Electroacoustic landscapes that would flirt with noise ideals and conventions.

(Menche on his 90s material from Andrew Lile’s blog)

“My favorite “making” was my earliest work which was wildly exciting and fun but the actual recording creations are really not good at all. My earliest recordings are my least favorite but the making of them was my favorite because it was crude times for me. I had to make some crazy noise instruments from junk. And then all the grungy dirty noise that would happen. Fun times! Like as a kid playing in the mud. Now it’s playing in the digital clean bathtub.”

I always found the dismissal of this early material puzzling to me because of course it is natural to think of the newest material as the best stuff you’re making and the oldest as the worst, but my personal preference has always leaned more towards the more primitive, really dirty feeling material, because it still holds the ideals of alienating and dissecting sounds that remain constant in his work, but in this more primitive work flow things feel more lifelike and organic, as well as having that really nasty brooding atmosphere and still having the excitement of the strange on-the-spot kind of curiosities I enjoy.

I think that’s enough trying to justify why this one is my favourites, in regards to actually how this album sounds it is very focused on industrial and noise related sound sources, those being “junk sounds” such as the usual junk metal for gestures such as bowing, thrashing and scraping, small metallic objects for fumbling and tapping, as well as what I believe is a stone being dragged along pavement in Part 5, which has always been one of my favourite sounding tracks I have heard because of how unbelievably grimey the sound is. Other mainstay textures are the kind of high distortion sheet metal crashes and feedback wails which unusually never take forefront and moreso suppliment the dread, for example Part 6 starts with a Harsh Noise session which is slowly drowned in layers of lashing motions and reduces the feedback to a siren-like wail.

Getting further away from particulars of each track, a standout element to me is the hissing static washes that linger in the background and march to the forefront, the sparse death industrial thuds that invade certain tracks, the droning ultra minimal ultra low bass which all create an extremely effective dead atmosphere for the sound to live in, even during more subdued passages. Why this sticks with me so much is because of the simplicity, that certain colours of noise and certain frequencies alone can make something feel so cold and scary. The use of radio on this too, using the static (as the title implies as the focus of this album) to create the industrial atmosphere, the soft reverb texture emulating shuffling motions, the complexity of the sound eventually overwhelming, but also in rare cases allowing for him to throw in samples of radio transmissions at will.

Overall I am glad that I enjoyed this album still after however long it has been since I last heard it, it has always been a big influence on my music and I remember early experiments of mine being mostly trying to rip this off. I was scared I wouldn’t like it as much because my interest in dark ambient has mostly dropped off as of recent years, but when comparing this album to the tracks we were shown in class I felt like this would be a good opportunity to think about this album in more detail than I would prior, as I think of it definitely more as an electroacoustic album than a noise album.