here is a definite amount of machismo in performing and listening to so-called “harsh noise” music. The payoff can be dubious. One could feel the triumph of surviving what could seem to be a spiritual tribulation, emerging with a feeling of greater mental and perhaps egotistical strength. There are also the physical damages to the ear and the dizziness from having the senses overloaded and deadened. It’s the feeling of being victimized as much as being victorious.

That idea reoccurs in my mind whenever I listen to how Portland, Oregon noise artist Daniel Menche treated Kiyoshi Mitzutani’s field recording of a garden in their 2003 album, Garden. Menche essentially added low-frequency drones and rumblings to a riot of cricket and bird noises. The opening minutes remind me of sitting outdoors and covering both of my ears—listening to the scant wildlife and freeway noises that seep through the droning of my bloodstream. However, violence grows during the hour. The insect noises gradually ring and singe the ear; the drones became erratically seismic as they work against the heartbeat. Yet, by the end of the record, there is still that relief of wearied, but hardened survival. Menche is one of the finest artists working today in the “somatic” area of noise music: he attempts to extract the raw emotion from natural sounds recorded from the human body and the open air, along with broken audio machinery.

On his two-disc album, Concussions, Menche explores the extremes of percussion, immolating everything for two hours straight. He does little more than pummel close-mic’d tom-toms and bass drums, and then electronically speeds or slows down the rhythms or scatters them in reverb and echo effects. At first, it seems that Menche did not perform anything as much as record dozens of people dribbling and shooting basketballs. However, such peculiar imagery soon gives way to an odd morbidity in hearing percussion instruments gasp for life. If anything, he employs tense, anti-rhythms that throw all out all expectations of groove and cadence. Across the twenty untitled tracks, the beats are sometimes slowed to resemble that of an exhausted boxer finishing the day on the punching bag, while Menche often tears up and then layers multiple rhythms to fall like hailstones on disintegrating concrete.

Heard individually, the tracks serve as fascinating experiments where you can hear an alien rhythm and then figure out what is so appealing and repelling about the sound. But listening to Concussions over the course of two discs and two hours is just the sort of daunting and masochistic experience related above. As an album, it would’ve been far better served as a 30-minute endeavor, keeping both the listener engaged and sympathetic to Menche’s ambition.