No Fun Fest ’09
TONY speaks to Carlos Giffoni, the man behind the wildly successful annual noise gathering.
By Hank Shteamer
http://newyork.timeout.com/newyork/r....jpg?width=480 BUDDHA BANG Carlos Giffoni makes a racket onstage, but in person, he’s supremely chill.
Photograph: Megan Ellis
A few weeks ago, Lou Reed and his Metal Machine Trio brought the noise to Gramercy Theater, performing two consecutive nights of staunchly abstract music. The sixth annual No Fun Fest, running Friday 15 through Sunday 17 at Music Hall of Williamsburg, promises a similar din, but with a very crucial difference. For Reed, the clangorous milieu has long served as a perverse kind of sonic spa, a place to unwind when rock & roll grows tiresome. For the No Fun set, though, noise is way more than a hobby.
Consequently, you might expect the artists performing at the event to permanently assume the po-faced pose that Reed and other dabblers in the field affect. But Carlos Giffoni, a 31-year-old noise musician and promoter who founded No Fun Fest in 2004 and acts as its sole curator, is as affable as can be: Slightly pudgy, with a mop of black curls and a heavily accented drawl, the Venezuela-born performer comes off more like Jeff Lebowski than a tortured artist. Reflecting on how he’s managed to fashion such a successful event (all three nights of No Fun ’09 have sold out in advance) within such an esoteric genre, he’s humble and matter-of-fact.
“For some reason, credit card companies really like me,” Giffoni explains with a shrug, between bites of pad thai at a West Village Vietnamese joint. “I have one or two cards where I charge all the costs, and then I pay them back with the ticket sales—that’s how it’s always worked.”
Giffoni (pronounced “Gif-FO-ni”) may emphasize his logistical savvy, but his networking prowess is just as formidable. The artist moved to New York from Miami in 2000, and quickly made his presence felt on the local noise scene both as a performer and a booker. The inaugural No Fun Fest in 2004 was mainly a showcase for him and his associates, including high-profile acts such as Wolf Eyes and various offshoots of Sonic Youth—which headlines this year’s festival on Saturday 16. (It was actually Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore who dreamt up the name
No Fun, borrowing the phrase from a Stooges song.)
Emboldened by the success of the first year, Giffoni began reaching out to various forebears of the current scene—like the legendary Japanese artist Merzbow, who played No Fun in ’07 and returns this year—as well as veteran acts in related genres such as ambient and psych rock. Typically there’s no intergenerational tension, though Giffoni does recall some bewilderment on the part of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, a member of the pioneering electronic group Cluster, which played last year: “I can’t remember which band he was watching, but he came up to me and he was like, ‘Why is it so loud?’ ”
Volume isn’t the only problem Giffoni has had to contend with: Sometimes the harsh sonics have yielded actual physical violence, as during one particularly memorable set by the visceral performance-art crew Macronympha. “That wasn’t safe,” Giffoni recalls with a chuckle. “All of a sudden the audience was onstage and there were things flying everywhere. I think someone got hit by a bottle and needed 10 or 15 stitches on his head.” The artist’s terminally laid-back demeanor allows him to keep cool amid the mayhem. “Whenever a venue owner comes running to you with big eyes and screaming, that’s when you’ve gotta try to talk to a few people and calm things down,” he explains.
Having mastered the arts of placating club managers and selling tickets, Giffoni is setting his sights beyond NYC. He’s currently prepping the first overseas No Fun Fest, slated to take place in Sweden in September, and he harbors dreams of someday expanding to his South American homeland. That’s not to say that he’s grown weary of overseeing the NYC event. “At least half of the times, I’ve gotten the flu right after the fest, just from physical strain,” recalls Giffoni. “But it’s what I enjoy, so I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.… Well, I do like being on the beach in the Caribbean, too, so that’s a hard choice.”
No Fun Fest runs Fri 15–Sun 17 at Music Hall of Williamsburg.