Skip to main content
When Daniel Menche came of age in the ’80s Portland punk scene, the goal was to be unique—“thou shalt not be like anyone else.” It’s fair to say he took this imperative further than most.
The 55-year-old Portland native claims to have never been in a band and to have no musical knowledge or training whatsoever. You’re more likely to find him, say, recording the veering of metal structures (this year’s Veer) or running the sounds of wildlife through a vocoder (his 1993 debut album, Incineration). And though he admits there’s almost “no demand” for the kind of music he makes, he’s amassed a considerable discography and cult following over more than 30 years as a sculptor of what he refers to as “abstract music.”
“I focus on what I love, which is very pure sound—pure, abstract sound,” he says.
For his latest release, Concrete Sines, Menche went into a pitch-black 50-by-50-foot room inside a giant World War II-era bunker at Cape Disappointment in Washington, cued up a kids’ “singing robot” app called Bebot, and spent three-quarters of an hour improvising with it through a Bluetooth speaker while walking through the enormous space.
“I just kept on going and going,” Menche says. “After about 45 minutes, I hit stop and it was like, oh, I think I might have an album.”
In addition to the plaintive sound of the singing robot, you can hear the crash of waves outside, the sound of Menche’s feet stepping on small particulates, and even the crack of the bones in Menche’s ankles (the result of a lifelong skateboarding hobby).
“It’s like the pleasure of ruins,” he says. “Playing around in ruins is incredibly exciting. You see so many young people breaking into abandoned buildings, making videos for Instagram and such. It’s quite a thrill.”
Concrete Sines has a precedent in the 1989 album Deep Listening, recorded by avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Band a few hours north of Cape Disappointment at Fort Worden State Park’s now-shuttered underground cistern. Yet Menche didn’t have anything so clear-cut in mind when he drove out to the Washington coast.
“One thing I’ve discovered is, anytime I have a plan to record something in the bunkers, it tends to be a failure,” he says. “I’ve spent many hours inside these dark bunkers, and every time I have a plan or a strategy it just doesn’t work out.”
When he returned home to listen to the recordings, he was struck by their quality, and he sent them off to be mastered that very night at Portland’s Stereophonic Mastering. They were out on Bandcamp within 24 hours, adorned with a forbidding photograph taken by Menche of the bunkers’ half-open doors.
The visual component of Menche’s work is a crucial part of the whole. He’s an accomplished photographer, usually shooting in stark monochrome. Pull up his Bandcamp page and you’ll see a wall of black-and-white photos stretching down the screen like a stark granite rock face.
“In the ’80s, I really wanted to be a visual artist,” he says. “What I started to realize was that there was an interesting cross world of visual art and sound art, and that was very enticing for me.”
Menche bristles at talking about the past, though he delights in recounting his career as a juggler in the first half of the 1980s, for which he went on children’s TV shows like Bumpity and entertained local kids at schools and hospitals. He doesn’t see much purpose in explaining his work in general, instead preferring for it to take on an elemental, unexplainable purity.
“The more I talk about my music, the more I dilute it,” he says. “I only do interviews to kind of prove how useless it is.”
Listening to works like 2008’s Kataract, a fusion of waterfall samples with electronics, you feel an overwhelming sense of scale, a sense that you’re actually standing under a waterfall and communing with the harsh beauty of nature. It’s a difficult sensation to capture in music, and you get the sense that if Menche compromised his approach even slightly, the illusion would be nowhere near as potent.
“A lot of people want to be a big, beautiful flamingo, or a big, beautiful bald eagle of music,” he says. “I always just want to be like the cockroach that sneaks in. You shine a light on it, it scrambles. But also, by being a cockroach, you have much more longevity.”
