#Soundtrack for the book D'entre les morts

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Polar Visions Amplitude Listening Set 1 - Daniel Menche exploration - Reviewing:

Daniel Menche - Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts"

Self-released on November 12, 2018 by Daniel Menche 
Reviewed format: 16-bit/44.1kHz ALAC download of the EP

Connected listening: further self-released works and reissues by Daniel Menche on his Bandcamp page (https://danielmenche.bandcamp.com/music)

The second release in this first Listening Set (which is now fully themed around exploring releases by Daniel Menche) on Polar Visions Amplitude is Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts”, a digital reissue of a soundtrack that Menche made for the novel D'entre les morts by Guillaume Belhomme and which was originally released with this same soundtrack included with the book published by Éditions Lenka Lente. The French publisher / label has released numerous other novels with accompanying soundtracks by Nurse With Wound, Vomir, Andrew Liles, My Cat Is An Alien and others as well as several books on Jazz and Avant-Garde music, at times in bilingual editions. As Menche mentions in the description of the download of this release the story of D'entre les morts is about a man on a train who’s eating glass. Menche’s approach to soundtrack such a strange story was indeed to use various sounds of crunched glass and trains but the result is even more eerie than you could guess from the description itself. This piece is more cyclic in nature than Desiccation but equally strong and immersive in nature as you will find out soon. In the case of this reissue you’ll find the music in the form of a single CD quality track, identical to the physical mini-CD but with cover artwork by Menche, a dark grayscale photo (in line with the other releases on Menche’s Bandcamp page) of what looks like a tree-trunk but also eeriely seems to resemble a skull of some wild animal, intriguing imagery. Let’s dive into this soundtrack now.

Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts” carries some similarities in sonic approach to Desiccation, even though the source materials used are much more of a mixture of acoustic and electronic elements with the piece being built using quite clearly defined layers, some of which hover around the stereo field. These layers can be separated into metallic, screechy and squelchy electronic. The metallic layers form the main drones that carry the piece forward, a mixture of glowing resonant struck iron, hammered metal bars (sounding somewhere between a coat hanger and the kind of triangle “bell” you sometimes see in prisons in films announcing food breaks) as well as further overtones that are audible especially in the first half of the piece. The screechy sounds in the piece are all the layered train recordings of which especially the train brakes give them a note of harshness but besides the brake sounds you can also hear some clattering, wooden like sonic details from the trains. Menche hasn’t utilised the train sounds in a very explicit manner in this piece, feeling more like an accompaniment to the metal works than a steady clattering rhythm that is a bit obvious as others might have used them which does elevate these sounds above connecting them too much to their own source. The squelchy electronic sounds add a bit of Noise to the mixture, mostly aesthetically pleasing but in the second half growing in intention, the stream of the water like liquid scratchy texture appears to imagine the novel character’s disturbed brain in quite a literal but on-point manner. As I mentioned in the introduction, this soundtrack features a more cyclic kind of composition in which the separate layers are active in various phases, some short, some longer. The hammered iron droning appears for the majority of the piece and changes ever so slightly in pitch though the tones themselves mostly stay the same and is working together with the iron resonances in the first half of the piece, in the second half these hammered tones become much more prominent however, also becoming a bit more minimalistic and repetitive in nature. This does make the second half feel a bit more focussed on the “deep” of the deep listening method of experiencing this piece as the effect of these tones creeps into the mind mostly as a kind of hypnosis with some of the other sounds falling a bit out of focus (in my experience at least) but it does allow the squelchy electronics to subtly grow more intense in this second half to eventually overtake the main focus of the piece in the ending fade-out of the piece, a crackling soup of crunchy noise softly seeping away into the distance. Looking into the general immersive effect that this soundtrack has on the mind I felt that besides the actual story from the novel the piece especially relates to a kind of hyper-sensitivity of sounds. The imagery conjured up in my mind was especially that of a man locked up in the living room of his house, scared of all the sounds around him, whether its a chiming old clock or even a bit of creaking in the walls, all sounds appear to be piercing into his ears and mind likes knives stabbing him. The subtle minor / major key shifts of the resonant drones of this piece also further hint at an unstable state of mind with the piece never quite falling into a musical kind of “tones” or chords but remaining in that signature Menche field of eerie abstract tones. The aforementioned cyclic nature of this piece also makes the piece feel quite more like a summary of events, layered over each other rather than the traditional progressive form of a soundtrack / soundtrack composition but the variations that do appear over time still do keep the piece flowing forward too even though dramatic events never happen within the piece. Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts” is another great entry in Daniel Menche’s extensive discography and features some crisp mastering by experimental musician Andrew Liles who creates very interesting and imaginative solo music as well as part of several avant-garde groups the most well-known of which Nurse With Wound. Liles especially brought out some great warmth in the mid and high frequencies of the spectrum and brought out both the sharpness of the metals and the clarity of clattering and squelchy sonic elements in the mix. I award this soundtrack a Polar Visions Amplitude of 95 dB. This is another highly recommended listen within Menche’s discography and once again showcases Menche's imaginative, enjoyable and deeply felt creativity in the field of abstract Drone inspired Industrial music.

You can get Soundtrack for the book "D'entre les morts” in download format from Daniel Menche’s Bandcamp page here: https://danielmenche.bandcamp.com/album/soundtrack-for-the-book-dentre-les-morts