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 concrète 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.1. CARLOS GIFFONI : Severance I 01:24
2. CARLOS GIFFONI : The Hermit 14:33
3. CARLOS GIFFONI : Severance II 00:16
4. CARLOS GIFFONI : Knife 05:03
5. CARLOS GIFFONI : Shaved Arms 10:03
6. CARLOS GIFFONI : Severance III 00:30
7. CARLOS GIFFONI : Athens 14:40
