Jugularis

• Artist: Daniel Menche
• Rating:
• Release Date: July 25, 2006
• Total Time: 56:27
• Genre: Avant-Garde

Review

Jugularis finds sound experimentalist Daniel Menche embracing rhythm to an unusual degree -- but in his own, slightly creepy way. It's said that his personal musical philosophy is "If music is like blood, then make the speakers bleed," but he takes that imagery more literally here than you might expect: the album's cover art appears to be a photo of partially congealed blood in a bag, and the rhythmic structure of the music could have been directly inspired by the sound of an accelerating pulse. The album consists of three tracks mixed together without audible interruption. The first starts out slowly, with a spare texture: bells that sound almost like gong buoys ring over a quiet, almost ambient thrumming low-end percussion, before tom-tom sounds begin emerging from the fog and come into the foreground. As the track goes on, percussion sounds pile up and become denser and denser, ending up in a feverish, almost tribal frenzy. That texture continues into the next track but eventually morphs into an equally dense but more high-pitched buzzing sound (which is, frankly, pretty annoying) until it's joined by an urgent mass of what sound like high-pitched mallet keyboards -- the result sounds something like Steve Reich with malaria. On the final track the sounds get even more dense and urgent, and more reminiscent of early Reich, with layers of drums moving in and out of phase with each other while glockenspiels titter around the edges. Then things gradually settle down, sort of the way a large building settles down after the demolition charges have been lit, and the whole thing collapses. Jugularis is interesting and exhausting, and probably not something you'd want to listen to very often. ~ Rick Anderson, Rovi

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