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Carlos Giffoni, "Welcome Home"
Best known for his No Fun festivals and collaborating with anyone hecan get his hands on Carlos Giffoni has finally finished his solo debutLP, Welcome Home. Recorded over three years and across severalcontinents, it’s the sound of electrical things gone against theirdesign to make something more of themselves and given time could wellbe his most pleasant piece of deformed improvisational composing yet.Important Records
Like Giffoni’s No Fun festivals Maya Miller provides the artwork hereand the imagery catches the feel of the album’s shifting fluidstructure as these dripping biological virus-born wasting germs seem tohave been caught mid morph, between birth and messy evolution tofluidic crawling abortions.
While many artists specializing in noise, distortion, cutups andimprovisational chaos will delight in the murk of distant analoguefeedback Giffoni relies on purely digital sounds and the crystal clearviolence of the music is initially more than a little startling.The introductory title track bursts forth as a mash of screeching hornsand mutilated arcade games and most of the music here is born of anintensely in your face digital trash aesthetic. His hard drive is achopping board where the soundtrack of electronic mutilation isexpertly carved into four minute pieces of melted compositionalmadness/beauty.
Surface appreciation doesn’t work with Giffoni’s work (as background noise its chaotic harsh speaker abuse) but up closethere are intricacies and moments of subatomic protein restructuring.Debris like “Trode Events” becomes a concerto for loose wires, bleepsand screeches as it barely manages to stay upright and the laser battleof “Expectations” becomes a warm digital bubblebath. The album’struest and most obvious spark of magic lies in the simpler closingstrains of “Departure Time” and its buzzing railway announcement tones.These stabs of tightly bunched notes phase up against one another andfrom this clash a new bell-like soft melody is born of the harshinteraction of these sounds. Then it all ends unpredictably with asplurge of noise like a puff of magician’s smoke.
This is proof, if needed,that Giffoni needs to spend a bit less of his time collaborating and abit more time at his PC desk.
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