Cut and paste hasn't always been an important musical technique for Old Bombs, but, with Carlos Giffoni's relocation to Brooklyn, the trio (formerly located exclusively in Miami) were forced to explore new means of sound creation. The long-distance musical relationship between Giffoni and the remaining Floridians of the group, Dino Felipe and Vanessa Payes, necessitated the beginning of a musical discourse, in a sense, which came to fruition with the release of Audios, the group's first CD without the suffix.
Giffoni was in charge of selecting the sound sources, and, though he's best known as one-third of Monotract, and a noisemaker in his own right, his selections are evidence of his wide-reaching musical tastes. Audios contains chopped-up versions of electronics, contemporary top 40 music, video game themes, dialogue, and more, some mangled beyond recognition, but, often, with enough of the original peeking through that the identification of the source is relatively easy. After Giffoni had selected (and in some cases, possibly created) the sound sources to be used in the construction of Audios, the results were sent to Felipe and Payes in Miami, where they sliced, warped, looped, and modified the sounds into whole new pieces.
There are plenty of the lighting-quick splices that one might expect from Audios' creation process, with microscopically short snippets flying by in such rapid succession that it's hard to even process the bigger overall sounds that result. Old Bombs' strength, though, is when certain sounds or samples are allowed to develop and decay under the various stresses of the processing their put through; like watching a dead animal decay in rapid stop motion photography, this allows for an interesting look at the destruction or realignment of a sound, which is not only usually a more engaging listen, but also greater evidence of the group's skills. When alien rhythms are created from the pitch changes in short clips of a pop song, or sounds echo until they're turned into grinding purrs, Old Bombs prove that there is a method to this madness that is not concerned with the extreme need for speed that often seems to drive those whose music consists mainly of cut-ups. This isn't to say that Audios is bereft of nice, jarring crashes of stuttering sound, or that the disc isn't without it's share of the sort of aforementioned cut-up cliché. Audios, however, is a product of a more diverse musical surgery, a meticulous and well-executed foray into long distance collaboration. It's almost enough to make one hope that Giffoni, Felipe, and Payes never set foot in the same room again, so they can continue to develop the sound that Audios introduces. Then again, I'd be happy with a CD follow-up that harnesses whatever fueled the creation of their Silenium Bombs cassette, still my favorite Old Bombs release.
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