2011 • Sub Rosa
Experimental music can be a crapshoot. Sometimes, the style created is fresh, interesting, and arresting; other times it fails to warrant listening. Daniel Menche's Feral is a strange mix which unfortunately lands more often on the "boring" side, although when it gets good it is quite good indeed.
While Menche may be a very well-respected artist in the underground experimental scene, unfortunately most of the music on this album doesn't do much for me. These four long pieces all seem to focus on one particular texture, drawing out one sound endlessly. Yes, the sounds do evolve and shift as they go, but they take so long to do so that it's hard to notice. It feels like very simple music, and while simple music can often be good, here it isn't. It just takes way too long for the tracks to develop into anything interesting. They stand as four giant monoliths of sound, hardly going anywhere but just existing, and to me it just isn't worth spending seventeen minutes on each.
On a smaller scale, though, the music is pretty good when not taken in all at once. The fourth track especially is really neat, its climax evoking imagery of electric storms and static developing from the darkness. Menche's particular brand of noisy-ambient-drone is pretty unique and for the most part I like what I'm hearing on this track. The third track does a very similar thing, evolving from quiet sweeping sounds into a torrent of chunky and somewhat harsh noise.
Still, despite those two tracks being standouts, it doesn't do much to save the album when listened to as a whole. Skipping through each track reveals the subtle changes and lets me get to the good bits faster, but as it's intended the album is simply too boring to be enjoyable. If the third and fourth tracks were shortened up and placed alongside more material like them, I'd be very pleased with a release like that, but it didn't happen here. Another album relegated to "background noise" status.
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