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?
