Thursday, January 12, 2006

CARLOS GIFFONI

I sadly knew almost nothing about Carlos Giffoni before 2004's inaugural No Fun Fest, the coagulating 3-day marathon of high-quality, low-rent noise that Giffoni has single-handedly engineered for 3 years and counting. Giffoni's fist-pumping laptop duet there with Dylan Nyoukis was a vein-bursting highlight, and since then, the activity of this tireless Brooklyn via Miami via Venezuela monster (solo, with his trio Monotract, and in collabs with Nels Cline, Jim O'Rourke, Lee Ranaldo, etc etc) has been stellar. I stupidly missed a "boys-only" Monotract duo set at Amherst's Gladtree Fest (though my brother and I enjoyed a drunken audience with the other Monotract "boy," Roger), but the rock-trio set at last year's Noise Against Fascism anti-prez-inauguration fest more than made up for that mistake, providing a fractured corpse of broken rock and scattered noise that totally contrasted the trio's all-laptop set at No Fun #1.

Even more head-altering is Giffoni's arsenal of recordings, which fire discrete, even microscopic sounds into layers of compounded electronic crush, like bullets weaved into a quilt. He hit a peak last fall on Welcome Home, a nerve-combing mash of digital crunch, blurry waves, and chopping, squishing blasts. The album's unending attack induces a kind of aural coma, like being hypnotized through cranial acupuncture, making it my second-favorite noise record of 2005, just under Mouthus's Slow Globes.

Assassin's Faith, a new 3" CD-R on Chondritic Sound, is a kind of follow up, two 9-minute tracks of construction-site slobber that instantly drills holes in the skull. "Assassin's Faith 1" is more solid-core drone than anything on Welcome Home, as an initially quiet string of pointillist sounds become a haystack of crackling currents, even sounding Double Leopards-esque, but later collapsing into shards of debris. "Assasin's Faith 2" is even bloodier, an onrush of robotic noise-soldiers bathed in a echoing beat, then crumbling under Giffoni's relentless artillery of flesh-ripping sounds. The 141 copies of this 3" are supposedly already gone, but Carlos might have some at future shows, all the more reason to see you at the Hook in March...

mp3:
CARLOS GIFFONI - "Assassin's Faith 2" from Assassin's Faith

4 Comments:

Blogger Dat RoRo Kid said...

cool blog. it looks exactly like mine! thanks for the monotract shout out...that's awful nice.

i'll visit regularly...

8:24 AM  
Blogger MM said...

cool man, glad you found it. i'll check yrs regularly too. when's monotract coming to DC again?

5:45 PM  
Blogger Dat RoRo Kid said...

no idea...we're in the process now of working on new material for a Load Release later this year. We have something coming out on Ecstatic Peace on 6/6/06. Nearly all that stuff you saw at N.A.F.

Think we're kinda working on new stuff then we'll go out and tour a bit once these release are out...

Going to No Fun Fest?

8:12 AM  
Blogger MM said...

awesome, I'm psyched to hear those forthcoming recs. unfortunately i had to bail on no fun due to work crap but hope it goes great - post a report on your blog once the dust settles!

4:52 PM  

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