Daniel Menche & Joe Preston "Cerberic Doxology" (2008)
What might you expect from a match up between Mr. Joe Preston, he of Harvey Milk, Thrones, High On Fire and a million more, and Mr. Daniel Menche serious noise maker in his own right? Well definitely not this, although safe to say we're surprised but most assuredly not disappointed.
Cerberic Doxology is a single 25 minute piece, for just vocals, a glorious primal, ritual of chants and longform vocal tones, which at first, and only for the briefest of seconds, sounds a bit odd, maybe because we were expecting to be blasted out of our seats, but within moments, the voices grow much less distinct, the sound around them gets hazier and blurrier, the floor drops out and the listener is suddenly suspended in some whirling otherworld, the low voices become fuzzier and buzzier and soon become thick undulating drones, the higher vocals, soar and shimmer, and offer up soft smears of melody. It's like Ligeti or Part filtered through SUNNO))) or Earth, a totally immersive and nearly suffocating soundscape of layered thrum and throb. With headphones, at about the halfway mark we forgot what we were listening to, but it had totally transported us, and we found ourselves gloriously lost in a seemingly endless vocal drone.
Flip the dualdisc over, and play it in your dvd player, and not only will you be treated to enhanced sound, a super hi fidelity rendering of the music from the flipside, but you'll also get to see the accompanying images, slow shots of deserts and mountains, of wide open skies, smoldering volcanoes, strange stone monoliths, dark clouds, crashing surf, all shot in blacks and greys, and with some subtle yet strange effects, where the image will blur briefly, or the same few seconds will lock into a barely discernible loop, but always returning to it's slow haunting drift.
http://rapidshare.com/files/160527118/01_-_daniel_menche___joe_preston_-_cerberic_doxology.rar