Carlos Giffoni - Severance
Date not listed.
Rough Trade store review:
while he'll still carry around the tag of 'noise musician' in some quarters, carlos giffoni's recent creative trajectory has seen him venture ever deeper
into the realms of more formal and austere minimalist electronic composition. severance follows on as a natural successor to 2008's adult life, prompting
comparisons to the analogue stringency of mika vainio and pan sonic at their most experimental whilst also doffing a proverbial cap to academic 20th century
synthesizer music. the album is broken up by a series of concrete miniatures, the first of these being 'severance i', which commences the disc with a kind
of industrial hacking noise, beating away belligerently until the first synthesis track blurts in with an undulating throb: 'the hermit' gathers itself
from initial strands of gnarled tonality, eventually introducing sequenced elements that install a rhythmic order. at this point giffoni enters into a
sinister, spiralling soundworld in which starkly malevolent tones hobble around like something from a '70s synth horror soundtrack before crumbling away
and dissolving into a din that sounds rather like v2 bomber drones. so far, so good. even more rhythmic is 'knife', which sculpts raw noise signals into
rudimentary 4/4 beats whilst hypnotic arpeggiating synth patterns lurch around. 'shaved arms' is more aligned with good, old fashioned drone music and
commands a masterful array of buzzing, slowly modulating rasps, sustaining and throbbing with real menace and analogue heft. the last of the long-form
pieces, 'athens', might be the most complex and ambitiously constructed of the lot, combining the various techniques demonstrated in the earlier pieces
into a visceral finished product. here, percussive traits combine with pure analogue sound design and harmonically skewed step sequencing, all building
up to a punishingly extreme climax that crosses over into all-out noise-spewing dirge. another indispensable full-length from the no fun boss.
