Press Materials

Hi Rez. press picture 2008 by Megan Ellis
Hi Rez. press picture 2007-one, by Megan Ellis
Hi Rez. press picture 2007-two, by Megan Ellis
Hi Rez. press picture 2007-three, by Bill T Miller

Artist Bio

Related Articles

Profile article in The Wire May 2007 Discusses new projects, and ideology behind recent releases

Article/Interview in the New York Times previewing no fun fest 2006

2005 Storing zine (Belgium) Interview Discusses family,noise,improvisation,art and no fun

Article and interview On Japanese Book 'No Wave' Published by Esquire Japan Discusses No Fun Fest, current scene in New York and contrast/connections with the No Wave movement of 20+ years ago

Tokion Magazine one page feature titled "King of Sound"

Spin Magazine Article titled "the Art of Noise"

Dusted Listed. choosing 10 records in 2003

Village Voice article on the New York new No Wave scene

Pitchfork reviews: "Arrogance" CD, Fe-mail/Carlos Giffoni "Northern Stains" CD, "Welcome Home" CD and of the track 'Bushwick' also off the Welcome Home CD.

Record Reviews

Eternal Noise EP/CD

No Fun Fest’s scuzzmaster general Carlos Giffoni is no stranger to a penetrating drone. Last year’s Arrogance was a subsonic basement rumble, a bleak, barren almost-metal record that could give SunnO))) a run for their cloaks. But Eternal Noise not only turns that frown upside-down, but rockets it heavenward, showing an enormous, limitless world through incredibly simple drones—think the meditative sitar drones of Pandit Pran Nath as processed through Kevin Drumm’s row of pedals—a glorious monochrome like neon Rothko painting. The same Technicolor dronegaze on that Fuck Buttons record you love, but made by a grown-ass man with a lot more patience and focus. Like listening to a fucking laser beam! Maybe it could to elevate the listener to a higher spiritual plane—the title and the rows of religious artifacts (taken from Giffoni’s trip to Japan) certainly suggest as much. If not, at least it’s the most glorious, abrasive and bold drone record you’ll hear on planet earth all year, turning Oren Ambarchi flutter into a sharp dart, Growing cloudpuffs into impenetrable fog.
-Christopher R. Weingarten, Paper Thin Walls

It’s rare for a record to sound exactly like what its title suggests. Sure, lots of titles are evocative of the music the record contains, but few titles actually serve as descriptors of their sound. Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma come to mind, as does Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun, but while Trousk Mask Replica or A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die set the tone for the album, they don’t explicitly tell you what you’re going to hear. Eternal Noise is indeed a kind of eternal noise, though not without a few qualifications.
The eternal is the easier word to parse. Giffoni here deals exclusively with shape-shifting drones, mostly around the lower partials of the overtone series. Each of the four tracks doesn’t evolve so much as amorphously change emphasis at a geologic or tectonic pace, almost a history of the Earth heard from the inside or the sound of individual molecules vibrating, a kind of nano-counterpoint. Even where there is a pulse within the drone, it serves not as a driving teleological force but rather as a mere marker of the passing time, alluding to the stasis of the most ambient of krautrock tracks. On top of that, Giffoni seems to be evoking a kind of throat singing where the vocal chords have been replaced by charged wires that crackle, buzz, and distort as they vibrate. Each overtone has its own individual color of noise, so the composite is like the gradual color shifts of oil on water or of a dissolving Gobstopper.
Were those flavors of noise not so harsh around the edges, this album could almost be meditative. It is fitting that the liner notes are mostly pictures of Japanese temples, since their serenity is clearly behind almost every sound here, even the harsh ones. And when each track cuts off suddenly, it feels as if you're being unwillingly wrested back into reality.
-Dan Ruccia, Dusted Magazine

In interviews, Brooklyn noise head Carlos Giffoni often talks about striving to avoid repetition. So far he’s kept his word: while his work has a clear consistency – no one could mistake it for anything but noise – each of his albums is distinct. 2005’s Welcome Home contains super-detailed electronic pieces, while 2007’s Arrogance, made on analogue equipment, eschews miniaturism for widescreen sound. Eternal Noise is another left turn, offering simple pieces that change gradually and sometimes inaudibly. As the title implies, Giffoni here views noise as a constant steam he can tap into without obstructing its elemental flow. He hasn’t crafted these four tracks so much as channelled them, funnelling basic tones into lengthy sonic rivers.
The album opens with the title track, 19 minutes of oscillating drone that builds imperceptibly. At first it sounds spacious, then dense and austere, but that shift is likely as much in the listeners’ mind as much as it is in the music. From there the album becomes increasingly minimal: “III” resembles an artfully administered hearing test, while “IV” sounds like a machine shop converted into ones and zeros. Yet each piece centers on Giffoni’s attentive choices, a hallmark of all his endeauvours. Eternal Noise may not be Giffoni’s best record, but then it’s not really intended to be. These tracks are separately made pieces he was unable to find a place for on previous albums. But as former orphans, they fit together well, revealing another side to Giffoni’s ever changing aesthetic.
-Marc Masters , The Wire

Arrogance CD

Confused? Thought Carlos Giffoni was reliably digital, a posterboy laptop improviser and composer? Thought-- har har har-- he was the humble and generous musician he seemed around town? Me too. Arrogance-- "five chapters of sound inspired by one of the most powerful and complex emotions of humankind"-- is not typical output. Who would've thought Giffoni's first release on his own imprint, No Fun Productions, would see him exhibiting his dark side, Prurient-style, slumming with analog equipment to dodge the bright harmonies he can't help but send tumbling off his laptop?
Dominick Fernow, who performs as Prurient, and Giffoni are the most visible poles and role models in New York noise. Both release, record and retail; both perform; Giffoni curates his annual epic musical summit, No Fun Fest. An unlikely pair that nevertheless just released a split album, Heavy Rain Returns, Fernow has carved out purist space as the analog, sex-and-death demon down from Providence to cleanse New York. Giffoni, more mild-mannered and less confrontational, made his own gentler rep with colorful, granular laptop assaults. Then, last year, Prurient made a (blasphemous) digitally inflected noise-metal masterpiece for Load. Giffoni made Arrogance: The darker, droning, depressive counterpart to his 2005 LP Welcome Home.
Constructed entirely from analog equipment, Giffoni has dropped his carousel-ride ADD for the pulsating, black hole suck of monochromatic drones. It's noise's new bid to push metal off the cliff. Arrogance reminds of nothing so much as the moment in time when Man Is the Bastard quit to become Bastard Noise, to do with analog electronics what they couldn't do with brute force. (As did the Locust; as did Gasp, Honeywell, Volume 11, Born Against, and Mens Recovery Project: The merge of metal and hardcore has always lapsed quickly and savagely into noise.)
There is still a lot of Welcome Home to be found in Giffoni's newest experiment. "I Always Lie" is as air-and-light filled as former standout "Who Is Home", using a narrow palate of iceberg bass and shrill windy drones to open his sound up from the center out. Opener "No More Air", however, is a crusher. Using the same choppy rhythm patterns that he's made his signature since 2005's "Bushwick", his head-nodder almost immediately disappears into itself, sending up ring-modulated harmonies even as the warm synth crush of his analog setup collapses like a star.
"Wait for Me Dressed in One Color" lets "No More Air"'s tumbling angry buzz go dissolute and frayed. Giffoni checks through pitch changes until he is reduced, at the end, to a singular harmonic drone. Even Giffoni's darkest efforts, Arrogance surely among them, rebound over and over again with patterns, rhythms, humanistic sensibility.
Here, where his total gambit seems narrow-- a very thin strip of the spectrum compared with what he's usually using-- these strengths are all the more noticeable. It's the most physically immediate thing he's ever done, and one wonders how, and if, Arrogance will come off live. May we suggest No Fun, 2007?
-Zach Baron,Pitchfork February 2007

With his No Fun Productions growing rapidly, having diversified from its role as the curator/promoter of the annual festival into an impressive limited-run record label and organizer of numerous year-round shows in New York, it’s good to see that Carlos Giffoni’s not too occupied with the business end of things to continue to actually make music as well. Last year witnessed the birth of Welcome Home, Giffoni’s “official” debut full-length, as well as Exprmntl Lvrs, the latest missive from Monotract, of which Giffoni’s a third, and a spate of smaller solo and collaborative releases. Toss in two European tours and a jaunt across Japan with Jim O’Rourke, and Giffoni’s been a busy man, indeed. Luckily, Carlos also had time to squeeze in Arrogance, his second solo offering released by No Fun, and the first cd issued by the label, which, up to this point, was a vinyl-only affair.
Welcome Home was an entirely digital affair, and Giffoni’s traditional array of improvising implements has commonly included a laptop, with Giffoni bent intently, face aglow as he peers into its display. Arrogance, however, finds Giffoni going wholly analog, shifting his attention away from the crystalline shards and slivers that formed, en masse the weighty heft of the music. On Arrogance, the rich, textured rumble of his analog synthesizers and their characteristically warm crunch are the tools of Giffoni’s trade, and the shift in instrumentation seems to have brought out a new angle in his work. A single track in Giffoni’s solo oeuvre, or that of Montract, for that matter, is often the product of what feels like a handful of musical ideas, combined and packed into a usually frenetic, though cohesive, whole. Arrogance, however, is the result of a simpler approach, one that, in Giffoni’s case, could be considered almost meditative. Each track tends to focus on a single mass of sound, a slowly moving and slowly changing collection of ragged tones, gritty gain, and roughly-hewn pebbles of static. At times he uses the snowball effect, with a piece building in intensity as it seems to pick up additional layers of sonic detritus, but often he opts for a more direct approach, opening with a forceful storm that’s slow to dissipate. Giffoni’s not playing the part of the brooding minimalist, however, and if the powerful crunch of the opener “No More Air,” is an aural steamroller, Giffoni isn’t afraid to topple the machine, leaving its wheels spinning in the air, or sabotage its progress, with parts unhinged, a cataclysmic crash looming as a constant specter in light of the music’s irregular gait....
-Adam Strohm,FakeJazz January 2007

...Arrogance’s heavier and lengthier structures are more easily digested with this collection’s slower pace. His waves of energy form rhythm and melody in elongated gritty splurges of sound, unhurried movements of layering providing dynamics to these shifting oil glaciers...
-Scott McKeating, Dusted February 2007

..Though out this feels sleeky powerful and well oiled full of pain inducing intent. Like the slow grinding of chugging machinery, or the cities under noise heighten a 100 fold. This feels untouched by human hands- it feels like a series of crude recordings of machines working away under it’s own perpetual monition, or electronics misfiring and exploding. You really have to admire the bloody minded take no prisoner feel to it all, this is tough sound poundings that taste of burn gears, and feel of electrocuted and twitching limbs....
-Roger Batty, Musique Machine January 2007

Brand new CD by No Fun mastermind/Monotract member Carlos Giffoni, the first 'real' CD on No Fun and one that inaugurates an upsurge in label activity. Housed in high quality sturdy hard card gatefold sleeves, Arrogance is scored for a gloriously overloaded analog synth that growls, splutters and fucking wails in the kind of fully body-straining style of the recent proto-orchestral Prurient stylings, albeit with enough wacked signal power to bring to mind a particularly muddy solo ascent from Le Sonny Ra. Giffoni's best to date and recommended.
-Volcaninc Tongues February 2007

Welcome Home

’With Monotract and Old Bombs, his numerous collaborations with cohorts like Lee Ranaldo and Dylan Nyoukis, and his genre-defining No Fun Festival, Carlos Giffoni has become one of the most vital spokes in the greasy American noise wheel. Since moving from Miami to Brooklyn a few years ago, the Venezuelan has been supremely prolific, but solo releases have been rare. Welcome Home represents three-years of one-man sonic exploration, with 12 tracks of blindingly pure, surprisingly fertile sound Most of Welcome Home is aggressive, repetitive noise, which Giffoni devoutly hones and regenerates. It’s amazing how much sonic territory he can cover through simple, rapid-fire blasting. His hyper jumpcutting has precedents in the musical crunch of Wolf Eyes, the bouncing jolts of Shizuo, even the dense sheen of Hecker and Fennesz. But the intricate texture of Giffoni’s abrasive din is distinctive. His sounds are so fine and detailed they’re nearly molecular, as if recorded through a microscope. The opening track sets the album’s frantic tone: thick static and frantic glitches pile into a towering mound. ‘4trode Events’ attacks the ears from all angles, like a hearing test devised to punish its patients, while the drilling battles of ‘Expectations’ feels roughly like sticking your head in the coin slot of an ‘80s video game. Later, the squeaky fidgets of the aptly titled ‘Synapses’ resembles electrified mice fighting over a sliver of cheese. The only relief from all this penetrating racket comes in two collaborations. ‘Irradiated,’ a duet with Peter Rehberg, builds to a monstrous drone, while ‘Who is Home’ forged with fellow Old Bomb Dino Felipe, bathes contemplative tones in a warm distortion. Still, most of Welcome Home is like a row of sonic machine guns aimed directly at the head, leaving the impression that Giffoni’s sonic arsenal is in no danger of being depleted.’
-Marc Masters,-The Wire november 2005

Future laptop legend Carlos Giffoni is the perfect bridge between the electronic improv Ritalin cases he collaborates with (Dino Felipe, Massimo) and the rock misfits he often jams with (Thurston Moore, Nels Cline, Jim O'Rourke). His first official debut is loaded with digital deconstructions that are more engaging to rock ears than most laptop herky-jerk due to its focused energy, enveloping moods and repeating patterns (Giffoni sharpened his mouse-manhandling claws playing guitar for esteemed noise-rockers Monotract). His timbres are renown, but it's his tiny grooves that steal the show—funk out to the digi-doodles of "4-Trode Events" or the SPK-ish junkyard of "Bushwick." Best of the bunch is his collaboration with laptop pioneer Pita Rehberg, a woozy fog of warm Fenneszian embrace, and his team-up with old sparring partner Felipe: six minutes of gorgeous Oval-tine that sounds nothing like the Carl Stalling cut-upcore of their Old Bombs.
- Christopher R. Weingarten,- CMJ December 2005

Like Giffoni’s No Fun festivals Maya Miller provides the artwork here and the imagery catches the feel of the album’s shifting fluid structure as these dripping biological virus-born wasting germs seem to have been caught mid morph, between birth and messy evolution to fluidic crawling abortions.
While many artists specializing in noise, distortion, cutups and improvisational chaos will delight in the murk of distant analogue feedback Giffoni relies on purely digital sounds and the crystal clear violence of the music is initially more than a little startling. The introductory title track bursts forth as a mash of screeching horns and mutilated arcade games and most of the music here is born of an intensely in your face digital trash aesthetic. His hard drive is a chopping board where the soundtrack of electronic mutilation is expertly carved into four minute pieces of melted compositional madness/beauty.
-Brainwashed

North Six

If ever there was lo-fi punk version of musique concrete, then it must be this trio. They play furious music, one giant wall of noise that can easily meet Merzbow, but with a wider variety in sound textures. Sometimes the guitar sips through, psychedelic walls of synthesizer sounds only to erupt in a further wall of feedback and noise mayhem. The entire thing clocks in at 18:58 which will leave one breathless once it's finished. Essential listening for those who love noise and a text book for those who want to try their own hands at noise.
-Vital Weekly, # 430

"North Six is a mind-bogglingly great trio recording from two adepts and an up-and-coming interventionist. Definitively old-school noise in inclination, the performers repeatedly set bombs and deviant devices of their own making against each other, stoking a great astral spat. A wild plume of electric-fire smoke invades the performance space as Ranaldo's guitar is repeatedly speared by silver darts of electronics. This tactic only serves to illuminate those moments where the six-string suddenly soars out of the thick air and propels the improvisation far into the stratosphere, Giffoni and O'Rourke's duelling synths sparking like stars communing in abstract constellations."
- Jon Dale, Stylus Magazine, July 2004

"Ranaldo's electric guitar strafes and scorches, a snarling onslaught of clangs and feedback screeches. Giffoni plays guitar and computer, and he and O'Rourke use synthesizers like mean action painters, splurging, dripping and recklessly splashing the sounds around."
- Julian Cowley, The Wire, #248

"...fissions those blissful feedback codas of Lee Ranaldo and Jim O'Rourke's full-time outfit into their rawest atoms."
- Joe Panzner, Grooves 015

"...like being slapped by violent rain while riding a bike."
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes, August 2004


Old bombs Audios

There are plenty of the lighting-quick splices that one might expect from Audios' creation process, with microscopically short snippets flying by in such rapid succession that it's hard to even process the bigger overall sounds that result. Old Bombs' strength, though, is when certain sounds or samples are allowed to develop and decay under the various stresses of the processing their put through; like watching a dead animal decay in rapid stop motion photography, this allows for an interesting look at the destruction or realignment of a sound, which is not only usually a more engaging listen, but also greater evidence of the group's skills. When alien rhythms are created from the pitch changes in short clips of a pop song, or sounds echo until they're turned into grinding purrs, Old Bombs prove that there is a method to this madness that is not concerned with the extreme need for speed that often seems to drive those whose music consists mainly of cut-ups. This isn't to say that Audios is bereft of nice, jarring crashes of stuttering sound, or that the disc isn't without it's share of the sort of aforementioned cut-up cliché. Audios, however, is a product of a more diverse musical surgery, a meticulous and well-executed foray into long distance collaboration. It's almost enough to make one hope that Giffoni, Felipe, and Payes never set foot in the same room again, so they can continue to develop the sound that Audios introduces. Then again, I'd be happy with a CD follow-up that harnesses whatever fueled the creation of their Silenium Bombs cassette, still my favorite Old Bombs release.
-Adam Sthrom, fake Jazz

When listened to loudly, Audios creates an artificial wall between the ear and the immediate environment, almost encapsulating you inside your headphones. The brusque tones use stuttering slang to extreme, not cussin' but fortified funk, abbreviated glimpses into beat redux. At one moment the marriage of some entity that could only be a haphazard collision between say, Missy Elliott and Wolf Eyes gets filtered into the finale of a Japanese B-movie. Get me a towel!
-Tj Norris, Igloo


Live Inside the Radio

Carlos Giffoni's Live Inside the Radio CD-R approaches space differently. The 19-minute piece—his contribution to a Free 103.9 event where sound artists performed into transmitters, sans amplifiers—ducks internal logic, settling into open ended analog jamming, exploiting airtime through the repetition of hissing atmospherics built on feedback,throbs, pulsations, and Hot 97. Mimicking a radio stuck between channels, troubadour/luau-plucked guitar buries Missy Elliott's "Work It" beneath rapid-fire lasers, locusts, explosions. In this swirling land of make-believe FM, a noisy underground insinuates itself into popular culture before unceremoniously stamping it out.
-Brandon Stosuy,Village Voice


LO QUE SOLO SE PUEDE EXPRESAR A TRAVES DEL SILENCIO Y UNA MIRADA DE AYER

What a mouthful, and i don't even know what the title means. (Guess i should have paid more attention in Spanish.) But i know that Giffoni, whom i've heard already on a few earlier PE releases, is a fine manipulator of guitar sounds, and this disc is no exception. On "live guitar improvisation #1" his sound is a bit more violent than i was expecting, but it's an interesting meld of experimental guitar and power electronics with far more dynamics than i generally associate with the latter genre. The use of both continues into "the idea began in bushwick," whose tones are similar to an overdriven pipe organ but which is riddled with noise, static, disembodied voices, and other stuff that breaks down into something else entirely. He's on more "traditional" territory with the bright, Faheyish "for all the ones who i can trust," but the last song (with an indecipherable Japanese title) is a wild mix of tapes and sounds and noises with Giffoni's guitar weaving equally strange sounds around it. One of the strangest and yet strangely accessible guitarists working right now and well worth your attention.
-Dead Angel #48


Carlos Giffoni + Dylan Nyoukis duo (Live review)

Leveer: Having ample time to evaluate my time at NFF, I'd have to say this was my favorite performance of the whole fest. I loved Massimo and TLASILA, but this really did a lot of things for me. The music was awesome. It was so brutal and unrelenting. They brought so much creativity and intensity to their performance that I think anyone with a pulse had to enjoy it. Carlos showed ample emotion manipulating his laptop, nodding and shaking his head, grinning. And Dylan... oh, and Dylan. From shoving the mic as far down his throat as he could to voraciously slamming pedals and effects to screaming into the violin he had onstage while licking the strings and scouring his tongue with a metal brush. It really was perfect, and embodied so much of what the fest was about.
Amneziak: My initial thought was to disagree that this was one of the best performances. But this is why I can't: I'll be damned if I didn't get one picture of this set. I couldn't help but just watch. Maybe it's just the simple factor of how amazing Dylan Nyoukis was to witness on stage. However, if I could go back and take one photograph, it would have been of the audience's faces during this set. We were all amazed at the theatrics of this duo. And I still can't believe that Nyoukis left the stage without a drop of blood on himself. Carlos certainly seemed to be having the time of his life as well. And why not; he put on a terrific event in a terrific city. Wish he hadn't had the flu.
Mr P: This was the first performance where we all seemed to outwardly applaud, and not just from a performance aspect. While everyone up to Carlos and Dylan were good exemplars of the fest, this performance hinted at the more electronic performances that were to come. And the music... wow. I especially liked the juxtaposition between Carlos' laptop (a Dell!) and Dylan's innovative vocals. Of all the laptop-based performances, this was definitely my favorite, too. I got their album Chewing Smoke, and it is absolutely amazing. I'm glad their recorded music is just as exciting as their live performance.
Katiedid: After this set, I was compelled to rush down to my TMT colleagues on the floor and burst out: "That was fucking awesome!" Carlos and Dylan completely blew me away. At one point they brought everything to this huge swell that shook the concrete steps we were sitting on and I was just grinning from ear to ear. The theatrics, the vocals, and the relentless flowing noise was almost too much to bear it was so great, and then it wound down in a jet engine fashion and ended with an ambulance type alarm noise. Just brilliant.
-Tiny Mix Tapes Staff,April 2004