After a few years of silence, Daniel Menche has been releasing a lot of records lately. This new CD, on Alien8 sidelabel ?Substractif?, contains 11 relatively short tracks with a wide variety of sounds. This is not very typical for Menche, since he mostly releases very long tracks. Another thing that is a-typical is that some of these works are made with the help of a (laptop) computer.
Menche is well known for his use of ?concrete? sound sources such as his body, sand, blood, mud, glass etcetera. He records these sources with the help of contact microphones and thereby creates intense sound sculptures of a demonic magnitude and at the same time with a microscopic eye for detail.
Eye on the Steel contains the usual elements that Menche is known for, but is more varied than his other releases because of the shortness of the tracks (an average 6 or 7 minutes, instead of the usual 20-30 minutes). The CD contains quite noisy tracks, more crispy concrete ones, some ambient-drone tracks and even some rhythmic noise tracks. The overall quality and intensity are of Menche?s usual (high) standard, which makes this another outstanding release.
