If you know
Carlos Giffoni's work as an artist, a festival organizer (No Fun Festival) and the head of No Fun Productions, you might be expecting a noise bash from
Adult Life. You would be wrong -- to an extent. This solo album is not an all-out, balls-to-the-wall noise record. There is some harsh noise involved, mostly toward the end of the album, and always in a controlled manner.
Adult Life is a set of five electronic compositions exploring the more meditative side of noise, with structuralist (almost
Stockhausen-like) leanings. The whole album is based on analog synth sounds, the kind you get from putting two oscillators slightly out of pitch from each other. The sonic palette is rather limited, but
Giffoni gets the most out of it. "The Endless Mirror" brushes the landscape early on: metric pulses, rising and falling sweeps, dusty switches, and a block-by-block composition style that mesmerizes the listener (those sweeps can be hypnotizing) before catching him or her off-guard with a sudden change of compositional block. "Comfort and Pleasure" is also successful in its dense noise textures that don't quite amount to noise music. "This Is How You Pull the Trigger" is the noisiest track on the album, a stack of teeth-grinding out-of-pitch analog tones dancing a somewhat clumsy choreography.
Adult Life is no easy listening, despite its retro feel, but it represents an intriguing form of electronic music, and an unforeseeable direction in
Carlos Giffoni's creative process. ~ François Couture