Carlos Giffoni - Crossfades

In Monotract, I mainly played guitar and electronics, and only sang sporadically. I joined my first band at 14, as a singer in a Venezuelan punk-grunge group called Escamas de Jopelino. Monotract came a few years later, specifically when I moved to Miami. It was the second band I was part of. At first it was an improv band, then we started writing songs for a few years, toured as a group, and released records on Ecstatic Peace and Load Records. It lasted a full decade. I'm still friends with the other two members of the band, and they have their own wonderful lives going on outside the music world. I'm truly grateful to Nancy and Roger because they opened the doors of experimental music for me. Old Bombs, on the other hand, was a side project, much smaller, just really wild electronic music, and we only made a few tapes and one record. The band was with Dino Felipe and Vanessa Payes, two people who are very dear to me. I haven't seen Dino in years, but Vanessa moved to Los Angeles and I run into her often. She works at one of my favorite restaurants. She's one of the best cooks in the world and one of the sweetest people I know. So what's left to me from those two bands is mostly the friendship and the various experiences we shared together. I still have an archive of recordings, though, and I hope someday people will discover it and appreciate it.

You've collaborated live and in the studio with Jim O'Rourke, Nels Cline, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Chris Corsano, Okkyung Lee, Lasse Marhaug, Laurel Halo, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Prurient, Astro. Which collaboration was the most exhilarating, and which one left the deepest mark on you as a musician?

I don't think I can pick a favorite collaboration, and I feel enormously lucky to have been able to share a stage with all those people, and many others, whom I consider masters of their craft. I grew and keep growing every time I play with any of them (I got to play with Thurston in a trio with Mike Conelly last year at a local event, and I did a duo with Corsano just a few months ago). That said, the two most shocking moments were these: the first time I played with Thurston, because suddenly what was supposed to be a duo with him turned into a quartet with Nels Cline and Lee Ranaldo. I was 23 and had just moved to New York, and I was already sharing a stage with three musicians I adored beyond measure and who had shaped my musical education. It felt like a dream. I met Thurston and Lee in 1998, and Nels around the same time. I eventually found out they liked what I did. I sort of expected that I'd play with one of them someday, but certainly not right away. I'd been living in New York for a year and was already playing with all three of them - it just didn't make sense. It was incredible. That show was what really turned me into an improviser unafraid to go toe to toe with anyone. Then there's the time I played with Merzbow in Tokyo; Masami is the undisputed king of noise, and that night he showed up with nothing but analog gear. We played for about 70 minutes without stopping once. That night was like leaving my own body.

You ran the No Fun Fest in New York for six years. You were the first to put on a musician as significant as Oneohtrix Point Never. Do you still organize events like that? Any new names from the improv scene you'd like to point us to, or have you given up on the talent-scout career?

Carlos Giffoni as an organizer of major events and a label head is currently retired from that world. I've put on a few smaller shows in Los Angeles, but right now I have other priorities besides organizing a big festival or producing other people's recordings through a label. If I were still active with my label, the person I'd sign in a heartbeat is Bana Haffar. She's an extraordinary young musician who plays modular synths. Here in Los Angeles she's impressed me more than once with her beautiful compositions.

You're active in Rogue Squares with Elaine Carey. Where does this project stand right now? Any news about it?

This is my most active project in Los Angeles at the moment; we rehearse once a week and have already played a handful of shows this year, with more lined up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Elaine is a great improviser and has a fantastic noise band called Telecaves. Rogue Squares is less noisy and leans more into improvisation and the abstraction of ambient electronics. We've made some recordings at home and will probably put several of them online, then we'll do a demo tape that we'll only sell at our live shows. The plan is to keep the project going, and hopefully get a first LP out, then tour if interest in the band keeps growing. We wear really imaginative outfits for our shows, and we try to slowly shift the air in the rooms we play, building huge sonic structures out of minimal setups. I'm having a blast with Elaine on this project. It's also a project that leans heavily on aesthetics.

"VAIN" is the soundtrack to a film playing in your head. The script tells the story of a young woman with mysterious psychokinetic powers; a fragile soul lost in the deserts and beaches of California, searching for answers about her mysterious past. The soundtrack follows the protagonist on a fantastical journey that changes her world forever. An album that's imaginative through and through, then. How did this record come about?

I fell in love again after several years. This record grew out of a very complicated relationship with someone I was dating. She had some mental health issues and several addictions. It was two years that were wild, passionate, invigorating, but also very painful. The relationship ended recently, but I made the record while we were still together, leaning on my ability to cope with hardship; I somehow needed to get out what I was feeling. All good art comes from suffering, right? Also, I really love science fiction, and in my mind it's as if there's a very bold visual language running through it that inspires everything else.

I know you work on video games and write comics. How much have these passions of yours influenced this latest work?

I got into video games five years ago, while I was working on "VAIN", but the two things don't really influence each other. Writing comics is something new for me, I only started down that path last year; it began because I couldn't make the film I was dreaming of for "VAIN", then I realized I could do it as a comic instead, and that's how I discovered that world, quickly learning to do everything myself without giving up on the professional side of it. Actually, I'm working on two completely different comics with two fantastic teams of artists; I also plan to make a comic for "VAIN" down the line too, I have a finished story for it, but I need a lot more to make it work, so it'll be a few years before it comes out. As for the other two projects, I'm much further along, but I can't announce them yet. I hope to announce something about this soon through social media, especially my Twitter profile @carlosgiffoni.

You left New York in 2012 and moved to Los Angeles to take a break before making this record. Why this long break from music?

When I left New York, I was running away from a number of things: a ten-year relationship that was really going downhill, bad eating habits, a job I hated, the scene I was part of was dying out, other developers were buying up the spaces where I used to put on shows, and almost all my favorite bands had broken up by then. There were also some pretty toxic friendships, I hung around a lot of the wrong people, and on top of that the label wasn't financially viable anymore and it was clashing with growing work demands. I also put out an EP, which was probably my most complete musical work, but it was impossible to play live without hiring a band, and at that point I had no money to pay one, and not even enough songs to make it work properly - basically I had no energy left in me at all. Those were genuinely dark times and I just needed to put myself back together. It was the right moment to get out of there. And I was also creatively exhausted and emotionally dead, so when I got to Los Angeles I stayed away from music and focused on my day job, because that was easy; making music was still too painful at that point. In my first four years in Los Angeles I played basically three shows, two of which were with Chris Corsano, because I wanted to go to the moon and back playing with one of the most extraordinary drummers this dimension has ever produced; I also opened a show for Oren Ambarchi, because he asked me to, and he's one of those extraordinary musicians I can't say no to. Since then, I've changed my eating habits, spent a lot of time at the beach reflecting on myself, and started working on "VAIN". Then, at some point, I started playing with Elaine in the aforementioned Rogue Squares project. Corsano recently moved back to town and we played together a few months ago, and I've also recently played with Thurston and opened a few shows for his band, again with Elaine. I'm playing more often again and it feels really good. I hope the energy keeps up!

The new tracks on your new record - out in mid-May - were created with a variety of analog gear, with no effects or computer-based instruments, and no overdubs. The final material was selected from dozens of hours of recordings, with final mastering by Al Carlson. Why this choice? Is it a return to your roots? Were you feeling nostalgic for something?

Well, this is how I've been working for the past twelve years, with analog gear alone. I started out as a guitarist in 1997, did everything I could with that and moved on. The same goes for computer music - from 1999 to 2005 it was fun and I made some pretty crazy stuff, but I never felt fully immersed in the sound until I started playing purely analog synths around 2005. Since then, that's mainly what I play. I like music that feels constantly alive, even if it's slightly imperfect. That's the only way the energy takes on the right meaning for me, and I also try to avoid overdubbing any recording, and when I play a piece live there are no pre-recorded elements, just the systems and the movements I perform live, so every performance is slightly different because of how I approach sound in that exact moment. I worked with the label Mexican Summer on the "Evidence" EP, and that was the last recording I made before unplugging for a while and leaving New York. I really love that work, so it was my first point of reference when it came time to record "VAIN".

When are you coming to Italy? Do you know any Italian producers or musicians? What's your relationship with Italy?

I might play in Milan in early December, but the details haven't been confirmed yet. I'm hoping some other offers come in too, so I can play in other cities as well. On the same trip, I'll also be performing in Sweden, and I'm still working out other dates and locations for the same tour. As for the Italian musicians I like, Maurizio Bianchi is a legend, and there's a lot of music from your country that I love. My other favorite is Doris Norton, also a legend. But when it comes to more recent musicians, I can't think of many, since I've been inactive for quite a while. I was good friends with Massimo Pupillo, who did some work on Mego records in the early 2000s, and we even did a short Italian tour around that same period. But I haven't heard from him in years, I think he's stopped. I'm also friends with the artist Nico Vascellari, who invited me to play at a festival in 2010. But I haven't spoken to him in years. Then there's Dracula Lewis, I bought his first vinyl years ago. I think he's still active. My favorite Italian producer is definitely Barbara Bertucci from Milan, she ran a label called Key Lime High and before that Hundebiss, I put out a 7" on Key Lime High back in 2011 and it was a lot of fun. She still organizes shows every now and then, and she's working on the one in Milan where I'll be playing. Every release she's put out on her labels has been high quality and very distinctive sonically. Recently, she was in Los Angeles with some friends and we drank a ton of wine and ate a ton of food, like you're always supposed to do with friends. I love Italy. It's one of my favorite places to visit and to play. And my family actually came to Venezuela from Italy, in fact my surname is Italian, so genetically I'm a bit Italian too. Every time I come to your country, I don't want to go back home. The Italians I've had the chance to meet are incredible, full of energy. If any festival in Italy invites me, I'll definitely be there.

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