DANIEL MENCHE & MAMIFFER - Crater

The dark musical creature of Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner (ISIS) is no longer a solitary beast, but increasingly an accomplice in the assertion of other substantial dark sounds. Mamiffer has left its mark alongside Locrian, Pyramids, Merzbow and Circle: disparate attempts – perhaps even desperate ones – to reinvent a project that no longer has the incisiveness of its early days, and which by now rests more on Turner's metal-scene résumé than on the inventiveness of the pianist and his life partner.

Daniel Menche, a veteran of an ambient-noise discourse that has continued uninterrupted since the early Nineties, is so far the duo's first "historic" American collaborator, having worked alongside them for about four years before the release of this joint studio work.

"Crater" is made up of six different views onto the same soundscape, at times all-encompassing, at others confined to the smallest detail: the field recording of specific natural elements and phenomena – such as the sound of stones that opens "Alluvial" – is part of a tapestry built on crossed sonic countershots, heading toward a totalism that combines the drone matrix with Menche's harsh electronic component, a pervasive and almost dominant thread throughout the whole album.

The volumetric swelling of static drones like the one in "Husk" grows ever more unsettling the longer it is sustained. The ultimate aim is to give shape to the conflicted feeling of fascination and terror toward an inhospitable natural environment, whose magnificence survives precisely because it cannot be tamed and put to use. It is the sound of the fatal ice and crevasses that dominate the "horrors" of Caspar David Friedrich, an art in which human gesture and vision disappear, succumbing to the unspeakable vastness of an unspoiled, sovereign landscape.

Likewise, the master and his acolytes dissolve into the fifty minutes of a journey accompanied by a deafening silence. Thus the equally desolate opening and closing tracks – where the piano's ostinatos gradually distort under noise-driven influences – take on the status of a parenthetical commentary, to and from a lost dimension of which we're allowed to glimpse only a fragment, just enough to intuit its sublime and unsettling majesty.

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25/11/2015