Pitchfork

    02   65:08
    

On my discman that means two tracks that total 65 minutes. In the instant when I see that display and crunch those numbers, certain questions inevitably come to mind: How is this person going to keep me interested for 30-minutes at a stretch? What are they going to be doing with all that space? How many times in my life am I going to hear the final five minutes of those 30-minute pieces?

Well, on Beautiful Blood, Daniel Menche (who has released a lot of albums I haven't heard) does a wonderful job keeping me engaged over pair of his half-hour tracks. Menche's music is built around drones that stand tall and stretch deep and wide-- drones like that need a lot of time to develop. Shrinking these things down to pop song lengths (or even 10-minute slabs) would be like trying to condense a season of The Sopranos down to a two-hour feature film. Menche is working the long form.

As you might guess from the album title and cover that borrows its sinister "red forest at night" motif from Gas' Zauberberg, Menche's drones tend toward darkness. The first track is a messy braid of artificially held piano chords, sampled strings, bass pedals, and whirring noise machines, and his patient sense of timing as he introduces new textures ensures continued engagement. Though it seems quite static on one level, the first track actually changes almost constantly, so that any one 10-second segment is noticeably different from the ones that surround it. It builds an impressive head of steam, becoming noisier and harsher until it eventually leads to a single banged piano chord-- the same place the track began.

The second track shuffles the deck a bit, using some of the same elements (with the interesting addition of the endlessly stretched human vocals favored by Popol Vuh on In Den Garten Pharaos) while adopting a more minimal vibe focusing on held tones. The build happens even slower and the tone is less foreboding and more reflective. It still works, but if I were to get bored of one of these tracks eventually it would definitely be the second one. It requires a level of concentration and involvement that I rarely have. But this afternoon in the park I was able to give Beautiful Blood my full attention as I laid on the grass. It was an hour well spent.