Ducks Battle Satan

I first came across Carlos Giffoni when I stumbled across a copy of the Synth Destruction record he did with Merzbow in a chain store record bargain bin at the beginning of a year. Since that time I seem to be coming across him more and more. Besides being the founder of No Fun records and releasing excellent records by Religious Knives and Thurston Moore,  he also manages to produce his own variant of noise either with collaborators like Alan Licht, Lee Ranaldo, Merzbow, Fe-Mail etc., or releasing his own thing. Because of the rapidly dawning fact that I am a whore for Important records, I thought I would have started with Welcome Home or Northern Stains (his collaboration with Fe-Mail), Instead I picked up Arrogance from the excellent ebay seller Rowche Rumble who I also bought Merzbow’s out of print Bariken   and a Nurse with Wound record from. I’m a sucker for postage discounts so Arrogance become my next step in Giffoni’s back catalogue.

Arrogance is of course a noise record but it’s the first noise record I’ve heard that alters the volume and intensity of oscillating pulses to achieve an actual physical reaction. The first time I played this record It freaked me out. On the first track No More Air the  the noise is manipulated to create a sensation like the pressure in my ears was being changed. One minute the pulses were clear, the  next I felt like I was hearing them underwater, the next like I was directly under the still turning rotars of a helicopter. I could feel the pressure in my ears build and then fade and that’s just the  first track! I’m sure listening to this is not good for my long term aural health but No More Air is the second most listened to track on my ipod. This is a minimalist noise record. It uses repetition  to create a very noisy (and loud)  variant of drone. It’s well worth checking out.