When it comes to the loop or cycle, the endless maze or the infinity mirror we might think of Arvo PƤrt’s celebrated 1978 work Spiegel im Spiegel with its arpeggiated tonic triads, written in the composer’s distinctive tintinnabuli style which was inspired by early monophonic chant and described as like the ringing of bells. We might think of James Joyce’s late opus Finnegans Wake which begins and ends in the middle of the same sentence or the bureaucratic nightmares of Franz Kafka or the labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges who wrote that ‘mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men’. We might think of the One Thousand and One Nights and its narrator Scheherazade and wish-granting genies or on television and film the surreal spy drama The Prisoner, the harrowing figure of Noah Cross at the end of Chinatown or the liminal tunnel, ginormous bathhouse and ghastly No-Face of Spirited Away.
For his ninth solo release the composer Menchaca – a poet and visual artist who also quarries the past with Anar Badalov as one half of Hourloupe, who are named after Jean Dubuffet’s mixed-media cycle and whose latest album Levitating Fields from atomic ballads to arboreous blues seems to conjure a crackling, spectral vision of a long lost hearth and home – stakes out aĀ demon which he describes as a trickster, a rambunctious house spirit or djinn who finally reveals himself on the album’s closing song ‘Parens Close Parens’ through the recitation of a poem which turns out to have been driving events all along:
This particular demon is fond of mazes
But mazes are in short supply so he improvises
He angles in one hand a mirror
So that it shines inside the corner of another
Tied to a pole across a parking lot
Within an abandoned construction project
He creates a partial infinity loop
Of lines, circles and squares of derelict
Masonry. It is imperfect, this maze, and it is satisfactory:
He can gaze into it, its multiplications sufficient
To create a vision, which never needs much coaxing
To begin with, such that he begins to hear
The sounds of complicating space reverberating
In real time, waves bouncing where they hadnāt
Intended (a wave can have a way, agencyā¦), colliding
And where they intersect, a volume
In much the way overlapping curves
And circular patterns build spirals that become a study
For a tower. He holds the mirror
Until his muscles burn. The demon rubs his palm.
Taking its title from that final concentrated image, The Demon Rubs His Palm opens through skittering hats, loping kicks and a circuitous guitar line that glimmers and might well be licking its chops. Basing his compositions around that shapeshifting guitar which readily absorbs roots music and post-rock textures while rippling distortions screech towards the incendiary end of rock and roll, now adding drum programming and the expedient use of an electronic wind instrument, on this opening and title cut Menchaca’s canny demon appears to be summoning his energies or establishing a kind of force field as the drums echo and the track begins to splinter, its feedback loop possessing a whirligig quality like a warped or slanted carousel.
‘Abandoned Construction’ carries more of a shuffle and lurch, for a piece which serves as a partial ode to The Cure and especially its bassist Simon Gallup on classic tracks from the whooshing sweep of ‘A Forest’ to the ardent and more melodious swirl of ‘Lovesong’. Dabbling like ‘A Forest’ with the pentatonic scale, between its open strums, clinking percussion and bassy undercurrents the track turns into a transfixing and deftly propulsive groove, with aerial abrasions in the middle section before whirring sounds like those from a jet engine rev up the climax.
And concluding this section, Menchaca pays homage to Jon Hassell, the trumpeter and fourth world diviner who from his learning in minimalism and the Hindustani classical tradition would redefine conceptions of world or ethnic music, ambient and left-field jazz. ‘Altar of Horns’ sounds like Hassell at his most dense as Menchaca foregrounds his electronic wind instrument, with a few wafting harmonies lying atop a squelchy and staticky, rumbling motorik grind.
While there are traces of Kraftwerk and even King Tubby, it is on ‘Altar of Horns’ that the influence of Miles Davis really comes to a head, especially the opener to his early-seventies fusion landmark On the Corner which drew from such diverse artists as Sly Stone and Karlheinz Stockhausen and is defined as much as anything by the trumpeter’s use of a wah-wah pedal and Michael Henderson’s funky bass. As the groove begins to judder and shimmer is it us or Menchaca’s slick-handed tower builder who begins exposing themselves like showroom dummies or discovering themselves in the looking glass?
This kind of track-by-track analysis might be reductive since Menchaca recommends listening to The Demon Rubs His Palm as two continuous long sides, much in the same manner as Miles Davis’s first electric-period album In a Silent Way.
That second side then would commence with ‘Study for a Tower’. And where the first side seemed to get high on its own fumes, reaching for the pocket even as it stretched out a series of staggered grooves, ‘Study for a Tower’ opens through a suitably sheer verticality of horn pulses which sound like pipe organ stops being opened and closed. Soon enough we begin to scramble between those edifices as a sleek melodic line and skimming, ricocheting drum programming imbues the track with a cyberpunk atmosphere. Shapelier guitar textures billow and form and the demon rubs his palm in a stroking motion, as though making it rain down upon the blackened, neon-limned streets through a powder of gold dust. Then in the second half of the composition he retreats for more studious and clandestine plotting or conjuring, a sound which is captured through a repeating pattern of mallet percussion like yawning xylophone hits.
For fans of the poet ‘Crows Listening to Wallace Stevens’ might immediately call to mind such efforts as the haiku-inspired ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ – which variously blends the imagery of Matsuo BashÅ, Hokusai and Cubism – plus other Harmonium cuts like ‘Depression Before Spring’ with its crowing cock and rou-cou-cou. In fact Menchaca styles the song somewhat after the contemporary classical composer John Luther Adams, as a ribbon of pulses strains and distends to sound like far-flung bird calls before the sensation shifts and we hear instead siren alarms as we slowly but steadily begin to comprehend that somewhere in the vicinity a nuclear facility has started to ooze.
The steep horn pitches towards the end of the piece then suggest that the area has become irradiated as we segue into the album closer ‘Parens Close Parens’, an industrial or post-industrial stomp whose pounding drums are themselves buffeted by a clangour of keys and what sounds like a play of slide whistles plus other pulses and muffled twinkles like snuffer-grasped stars.
Suddenly a ripe and gleaming and full-bodied guitar strum slices the piece right open and Menchaca begins to recite the demon’s poem, which coming at the end of ‘Parens Close Parens’ reads like a manifesto elaborated now that his work has been done. It’s a thrilling moment that warms the body right through as Menchaca completes another stonking record, whether solo or with Badalov endeavouring almost uniquely with acuity and bold dynamics at this the spectral end of the blues.
