The jungle out there, and in here, and surrounding us in the city, in a desk drawer, a garden is a jungle. This garden is enhanced and protected by the calling birds and zoning bees. What acts initially as a field recording made in a distant Brazilian rain forest unperturbed by man’s nasty hand seems to be mused by its nature in the silhouette of all that is National Geographic, or at least graphic. As some of the sounds are delicately contorted and mixed with a fine superimposition of itself we are left abandoned and immobile. Birds just don’t sound like that, and Daniel Menche knows that as he toys with the “low sounds” on Garden. It is always refreshing to hear the undercurrents and ambient possibilities brought forth from the artist who has his PHD from noise university. The crickets crackle and forewarn of the invasion to come on this hour plus long player. As night falls, bats and toads croak menacingly and the creepy mosquitoes have nowhere to land except on your warm sleeping flesh. Revving winds and distant motors sound like a soldering iron or steel mill at full crank. There are a few still of the night moments in between the tensions and trill, but chances take sides with less comfortable possibilities as dawn breaks – and this all happens in the course of less than the first twenty minutes. Kiyoshi Mizutani provides all “high sounds” – indeed!
Garden is OUT NOW on Ground Falt.
