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Dream Walker on LP

Carlos Giffoni is the creator of the No Fun label and festival in NYC, which originally released Oneotrix Point Never, Emeralds, Wolf Eyes and was a significant foundational supporter of the new wave modular and synth renaissance emerging from the US noise and experimental underground in the early 2000s. Carlos here offers his first new album in several years, a beautiful tract and journey and synthesis touching on elements of the previously mentioned musical community, and harking to the essence of electronic music revolutionaries of the Editions Mego, and Mego communities of the 90s-teens. Vast saturated and melodic emotive themes and spaces of electronics bear sharp and rusty teeth at times, and succumb to a dream at others; Carlos's poetic discourse and intention bring this beautiful work into an artistic sphere, a place where inflexion is not directed or projected, but the implication encourages our spirits to fly and question the mysteries. With pleasure... always with a lot of pleasure.

-Stephen O'Malley, January 2023

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Dream Walker is an album intended for late nights. For those moments when you are ready to let go of your physical self and transcend momentarily into another world.

Dream Walker is also an album about someone who can walk between dreams. One who can surpass the boundaries of reality and slip into unseen worlds. A visitor who is writing a sonic story with every step he takes.

Dream Walker is also a love letter to all the music I love. I set out to make something that sounded good to my ears with no preconceptions or limitations, so it wears it's influences on it's sleeve. When you listen, if you start to feel like you know, then you know.

Every sound was made with hardware, mostly synthesizers, in 2023. It is also true that it was made by attempting to enter a trance state while recording each of these tracks and letting the subconscious take control to put a touch of otherness in the mix.

And that is that. I hope you enjoy this record. It was always intended to end in this form and to find a way into your ears.

Believe Walker, believe.

-Carlos Giofonni, December 2023

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About 20 years ago, Carlos Giffoni quickly made a name for himself both as a noise guitarist and a laptop noisician upon arriving in New York (via Florida and Venezuela). His expertly curated annual No Fun Festival, as well as his No Fun label, further solidified him as a key figure in the international noise scene. The festival's success proved the formula for experimental and improvised music fests could work with the noise underground as well, but it also capitalized on the faster rate of connections being made between geographically disparate artists as a result of the (still relatively nascent) internet. Back then Carlos would play his laptop like a pinball machine, in contrast to the static stage presence of most laptop performers, and his solo music, like many others' at that time, expressed a less dark and dour vision of the implications of harsh noise. By the close of the 2000s, he had stopped doing the festival, switched gears musically to playing the lighter No Fun Acid sets, and moved to LA.

Now he has re-emerged in a big way with Dream Walker, his first full-length since 2018's Vain (and only his second since 2010). Inspired by the masterful performances and diffusions he heard at the February 2023 GRM electronic music festival in Paris, particularly sets by old friends Lasse Marhaug, Jim O'Rourke, and Eiko Ishibashi, he began conceptualizing new music of his own in response, turning to synthesizers and other hardware to produce a work more firmly in the tradition of European electronic music than anything else he's done. Intended as a late night listen that evokes the edge of consciousness, with Carlos getting as close as possible to a trance state during the actual recording and mixing, each of the eleven tracks transition into one another rather than being standalone discrete pieces, forming two side-long suites that proceed like stages of a dream.

Unabashedly tonal and repetitive, the glistening opener "Now Dream," the droning "Sleep Walker," and the closing triptych of "Lost in Descanso," "Sunrise," and "The Hidden Path" occupy a power electronics-ambient nexus that feels spiritually close to the Mego label. Elsewhere, "Ticking Clock" is reminiscent of Stereolab's non-easy listening vintage electronic side, while the two-part arpeggiated "Euphoria" recalls early Oneohtrix Point Never (which Carlos released on No Fun). The contrast between "One Breath"'s crackling opening and it's remarkably fluid and soaring sustained synthesized chords is a distillation of the album's lingering tension between electronics' ability to project mechanical rupture as well as the organic and the infinite -or "walking between dreams," as Carlos himself puts it.

Produced by Lasse Marhaug (who also mastered Carlos' first solo album, Welcome Home, back in 2005), released by Stephen O'Malley (who I remember DJing at the No Fun fest), with cover art and photos by personal friends, Carlos considers the album a family affair. But Dream Walker most of all heralds a maturation of the artist, and stands as a record that exists out of pure desire, rather than obligation or force of habit; a statement of reconnecting with music not by merely revisiting it, but by building on what's come before, both in his own work and in the music he loves.

-Alan Licht, New York, December 2023