A document of zen-like peacefulness and mind-numbing beauty, "Garden" sees Mizutani treating the high-end field recordings, and Menche working on the low-end ones. The title pretty much indicates the sounds featured in the 65-minute track: crickets, birds, flies, grasshoppers... Like listening with an absolute ear to every single sound in a hot summer afternoon, this cd is about getting drunk on sound. At the beginning, Menche only adds some solemn drones and rumblings, and while his trademark "vehement beauty" is ever present, this is surely the least noisy work I've heard from him, though not less dramatic. At first, this work reminded me a lot of Francisco López's equally fascinating "Untitled # 90" on Pre-Feed, but here there is more variation, though at a slow, often imperceptible pace: around the 40-minute mark, the sonic mass seems to gradually rise in intensity and texture, in a sort of macroscopic drone - losing any documentary nature, the once recognizable sources blurr into menacing electronic swarms and loops, before vanishing altogether. "Garden" thus reveals its nature of severe inner discipline and releases all its emotional impact.