MENCHE, DANIEL - Forlorn

"For over three decades, Daniel Menche has roamed a terrain as sonically verdant as the mountains and countryside that surround him in the Pacific Northwest. His music is singular in one aspect -- intensity -- but it is divergent in every other form. Drifting from profoundly focused field recording, through to provocative electroacoustics, Menche's work is one that typifies a willingness to consider sound not merely as a horizontal linear form, but as a vertical zone, within which the timbral capacities of sound can be tested, reformed and rendered down into a true experience of acoustic affect. On Forlorn, Menche's work aches and grinds across itself. A glacial rasp that reaches deep inside and lights up a part of us we might not often recognize in ourselves. This is a work of profound distortion, in time, in harmony and in space. From Daniel Menche: "The word 'Forlorn' is defined as: 'abandoned, lost, ruined, doomed for destruction'. In some way, that sums up a lot about the mood of 2020-2021. We all felt abandoned and lost to a certain degree, in all of our own, various ways. I certainly did, and I thought one aspect that was the most abandoned was my sense of time. It's as though 'time' had abandoned me. or was it the other way around? Maybe I was abandoning time! My own solution to this recent forlorn feeling is to go on long hikes in forests around this area in which I live. Ideally, I want to get lost in my thoughts, and occasionally physically lost. Getting lost seems to be the main goal and intention of my musical work over the past 30 years. I have an ambition to see how I can get the listener to feel as lost as possible within my sounds and noise. Have you ever been lost in a forest all alone at night without any lighting? I have, and what a great feeling! I try to translate these experiences in the form of my music. A big gigantic dark forest of drones and noise to get lost in." - Room40.