‘Abrasive’ is the first word that springs to mind to describe ‘Guts’. However, on reflection, it’s simply too gentle a word that fails to fully convey the brutal impact of the recordings. The idea is simple: Daniel Menche destroys a piano and records the process in order to produce the source material for an exercise in anti-musical annihilation. But that’s only half the story, because the result is a sustained sonic assault to rival the likes of Merzbow and Kenji Siratori.
It’s immediately apparent that when Menche states his intention to rip the guts from the instrument, he means it in no uncertain terms. In fact, over the course of four (intestinal) movements, he proceeds to spread the entrails, decorate the walls with the blood and violently rape the devastated remains. ‘Guts 2 x 4’ is a car crash, the sound of demolition on an apocalyptic scale. Ten minutes of relentless racket that scourges the aural canals and scores the brain, it goes beyond mere noise: the listener experiences it with all senses, a gut-wrenching physical reaction.
‘Guts One’ consists of a full twenty minutes of endless feedback, drones, rumbles, clatters and bangs that set the teeth on edge and sends an involuntary shudder down the spine . Cranking up to distortion level, it builds to a barrage of noise akin to having a pneumatic drill applied directly to the cranium.
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There are vague traces of fractured, exploded piano on ‘Guts Two’, but they’re soon devoured beneath a deluge of molten racket, metal on metal, churning, grinding, grating. ‘Guts Three’ offers some slight respite. All things are relative, of course, and in any other context, it would be the auditory equivalent of a week in hell. It still grates, grinds, scrapes and drones for an interminable nineteen minutes, but the frequencies are less severe, the volume less blindingly intense. The effects are cumulative, and around halfway through the sound has built to a brain-crushing tumult, before finally tapering down to a clattering rumble of broken keys and wires being hauled over an industrial wasteland.
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