Carlos Giffoni & Okkyung Lee + Oneohtrix Point Never + Religious Knives

Sat 30 May, 2009, 8pm

$10 All-Access

Old American Can Factory

Carlos Giffoni is a prolific Venezuelan electronic musician who resides in the New York City area since the year 2000. Currently using modular synthesizers, hand made custom instruments, and various types of analog and digital synthesis in the composition of electronic music pieces, as well as improvising live with local and international musicians. His recent solo work has focused in live analog synthesizer pieces that put his style in a line with early Brian Eno, Cluster and Conrad Schnitzler while maintaining the harsher edge of his previous noise works. Carlos remains a major figure in the US and international experimental music scene, performing live in New York and in a number of tours and festivals in the US, South America, Europe and Japan. He is the curator of the No Fun Fest, a yearly event in Brooklyn bringing together a wide variety of international experimental musicians as well as running the No Fun Productions label. His work has been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Wire, Pitchfork, Art Forum, Tokion, Signal to Noise and many others. He also holds an MFA in design and technology from Parsons School of Design, where he occasionally teaches classes and workshops.

Recent live and recording collaborations include:

In the US:

In Europe:

In Japan:

Selected Discography:

Website: http://www.carlosgiffoni.com

Oneohtrix Point Never
Daniel Lopatin is the American-born son (b. 1982 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA) of Leonid Lopatin (former member of The Flying Dutchmen) and Susanna Lopatin (musicologist and piano teacher). He attended Hampshire College where he studied aesthetic philosophy and electronic music, later releasing his senior thesis recording on Naivsuper under the alias Dania Shapes. Utilizing freeware audio editing programs in conjunction with synthesizers, the Dania Shapes sound was a neo-romantic derivation of glitch music that opted for an ornate, hands-on melodic approach rather than systematized processes of degradation.

At the same time, Lopatin began recording as Oneohtrix Point Never, abandoning the glitch-work of Dania Shapes for a more open-ended approach to recording and live performance. Using a variety of synthesizers, sequencers and loopers, Lopatin employs a technique he refers to as “grid layerage” which abstracts the organizing elements of automated synthesizer arpeggiation via “blurring, decay and melancholic repetition.” He often frames his method around aesthetic motifs associated with the Berlin School of Cosmic Music, 80s new age, darkwave, b-film scores, fusion, minimalism and contemporary noise, but rather than focus purely on sentiment or style alone, the promise of OPN is found in his ability to rethink and retool ubiquitous sonorities into something engaging and personal. Lopatin’s long standing fascination with the old teutonic masters of the sequencer and their ensuing private press diaspora, his ability to underscore with tact and subtlety the lines of sympathetic resonance between the Berlin school and Giorgio Moroder, John Carpenter, and the tearstained pillows of the polysynth epoch remain entirely his own.

Lopatin is also member of Infinity Window with Taylor Richardson of Prehistoric Blackout and Black Egg. He is currently living in Brooklyn, New York.

Religious Knives
Maya Miller and Michael Bernstein met in New York a decade ago, and began making music together as half of sturm und drone quartet Double Leopards a few years after that. Religious Knives came later still, away from the road and the rehearsal space, borne and nurtured in cramped apartments throughout Kings County. Beginning in 2005, the pair released a string of CD-Rs and cassettes, both on their own Heavy Tapes imprint and through the labels of kindred spirits. Steadily moving away from the psychedelic tone baths and modern industrial scrape for which the Leopards had become known, Religious Knives coursed through minimal synth oscillations and spare Kraut repetition.

Mouthus’ Nate Nelson joined the pair in 2006, lending a powerful presence behind the drums that shaped Religious Knives’ rudimentary jams into rough-hewn, long-form paeans to tar-blackened bummer psych. Soon after that, old friend Todd Cavallo completed the quartet on bass, adding a sturdy low end and dubwise groove that lifted Religious Knives from cellar murk to black cloud puffs of bone deep alarm.
An active four-piece for a little more than a year now, Religious Knives have presided over a pair of twelve-inches, a couple of collections of out of print singles and long gone burns, and one full-length. All throughout, these four have traced a path away from the clamour they once knew, bathing slight guitars, interlocking vocals, and solemn basslines in reedy organs and recalcitrant modular synths. The seemingly tin eared would call it noise, but in these eight hands such a set plays as anything but, instead a (cough) syrupy stroll in search of the ghosts of rock’s classicist past.

With The Door, Religious Knives have not only found those bygone days, but broken them apart. There are bookmarks to be found here, pages creased in well-worn chapters. But make no mistake - theirs is a sound tied to the here and now, a summer record for those dread days when the heat holds low and skin sticks to cheap car seats and old patio furniture. These six songs are brighter, sharper than anything that has come before, locking in tight on jugular rhythms. It’s the score for disappearing neighborhoods and crumbling buildings, a hope of holding onto the past as those around us move fast to forget it. It is scent as sound, the stench of smog and sickly smoke spiraling towards the sky. It is Brooklyn, July of 2008. The sun has left us in the East, disappearing somewhere behind Jersey, leaving our borough to find the pulse of another night deep with the city’s streets.

Carlos Giffoni & Okkyung Lee + Oneohtrix Point Never + Religious Knives

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