CARLOS GIFFONI - VAIN

The Venezuelan Carlos Giffoni has spent twenty years in electronic music, diving headlong from one noise movement to another, eventually settling first in New York – a city where he ran the No Fun Festival for six long years, one of the most exciting experimental showcases on the planet – and later on the other side of the States, specifically in the charming and more easygoing Los Angeles. Over all these years, Giffoni has played alongside heavyweights of the calibre of Jim O'Rourke, Nels Cline, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Chris Corsano, Laurel Halo, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Prurient; he was also the first to produce a record by Daniel Lopatin under the name Oneohtrix Point Never, believing blindly in his talent from the start. But it's above all as a producer and alchemist of bizarre sounds that the man has repeatedly shown off his many skills, not least an unbridled passion for comics that, after a five-year hiatus, led him to create "VAIN": an album/concept conceived as the virtual soundtrack to a film that plays "only" inside his head.

The script of this imaginary soundtrack 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 music accompanies the protagonist on a fantastical journey that changes her world forever. The album is, then, an extremely surreal one, with Giffoni as the eccentric mastermind chasing evocative atmospheres and electronic arrangements that start out from a crystalline vibration and a flow that sounds like it's lifted straight from an early Boards Of Canada record ("Vain's Face"), virtually recreating an alien landscape whose contrasts rest on expansive, gratifying ambient planes: a kind of personalised mystification of the moods of the latest Dedekind Cut ("The Desert").

"VAIN" also brings a sometimes very strong departure from the rigid, psychotic pulses of the splendid 2012 EP "Evidence", partly echoed in the four-on-the-floor kick drum paired with the scratchy industrial-tinged bursts of "Erase the World"; a jagged, anxiety-inducing climax that is almost instantly set aside by the following "Hands" and its barely three minutes dominated by a liquid, cosmic keyboard, as if signalling the protagonist's sighting of a mirage. The same goes for "We Pay The Price", a track halfway between the previous two, featuring sharp contrasts and voltaic fragments popping up here and there like something out of a stellar videogame; just as the electro bounce of "Faith And Pain" sounds like it could be the potential theme of a legendary Neo Geo game, preceding the far more relaxed "I Can Change" and "Sun Rain", which close out the work and the idealised heroine's fantastical journey.

"VAIN" delivers intact the inventiveness of a master of imaginative noise unlike few others in the American experimental scene. An all-round artist and an indomitable explorer who has passionately resumed his own personal journey through the often enchanted microcosm of "other" electronic music.

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27/05/2018