Carlos Giffoni – Severance (2010)

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

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Son Lux – Weapons EP [Anticon, 2010]

Tracklist:

1:22 | 1. Weapons II
3:02 | 2. Weapons III (Polyphonic Remix)
3:56 | 3. Weapons IV (Nico Muhly Remix)
4:50 | 4. Weapons V
4:50 | 5. Weapons VI (Alias Remix)
6:27 | 6. Weapons VII

In 2008, New York’s Son Lux (a.k.a. Ryan Lott) released his debut LP to a chorus of praise… Much of what gave At War With Walls & Mazes its unique appeal was Lott’s central objective: to create a body of songs that inhabited the pop spectrum whilst ditching binary form (verse-chorus) for something more akin to chant. On record, rhythms and words moved uninhibited around anchoring melodies; live, this freed Lott to reinvent each track during performances, either reorganizing bits solo via piano or arranging the parts for new ensembles and instruments.

In the time since Mazes, Lott has stayed busy composing – among other things – hours of music for dance companies from New York to Paris. But for him, the chant-based concept of the Son Lux debut required further investigation. The Weapons EP is Lott’s self-issued challenge to do just that – to use Mazes standout “Weapons,” whose primary melody haunts various points of that record, as a launch pad for a complete EP of material derived from a single source.

To this end, Lott built three new compositions around the original’s essential kernel and enlisted three trusted collaborators – Anticon artists Alias and Polyphonic, plus Muhly himself – to do the rest. The result is not only six unique reincarnations of “Weapons,” but a fractal work where melody becomes song becomes cycle, with one essence woven throughout.

Piano Session by Why? & Son Lux @ BBMix - Back on Stages from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

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Full Crate & Mar – Conversations With Her (2010)

Producer Full Crate and singer Mar are two young musicians from Amsterdam. They fuse soul music and hip-hop with a sound design that – excuse the cliché -is best described as futuristic (think Flylo and D’Angelo falling in love with dubstep b-lines while writing the score for a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey). Conversations With Her offers five deep and musical love songs including one track with Eric Roberson.
Tracklist:
01. She Was Fly
02. Aftersexin’
03. I Said
04. Surreal Moments
05. She Was Fly (Feat. Eric Roberson)

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