Reviews:
(Ampersand Etcetera) Another from eh? (29): Giraffe is Joseph Jaros and Luke Polipnick who created Hear Here in real time. There is no indication of what they were playing with during the time that passed, but essentially is seems to be electronic things that make noises - probably computers, effects machines, radios, feedback. The recording then seems to have come directly to us. 7/18/07 approximately 8:30 pm is a short track that opens the album, with soft noises, electronic static, guitar loop and voices. This pressages a later track but there is a bit to come in between. Lucid twilight curmudgeon and Forever (1 and 2) are tracks of electronic noises - tones, scratching, electro-humms, scriggles, rumble burrs, processed voices (forever, for example, in the eponymous), squalls and squeels. I first listened at a loud volume to hear the parts, and found that a lot of it was harsh, disorganised noise, but with some more stable subtler parts. Another listening at a lower volume, where it was somewhat anonymous, and furtehr in the background, was more satisfying but it is still largely a melange created by a couple o' guys having fun. We then move into Static blanket transmission which takes the gentler and more consistent elements (particularly heard in the second half of Lucid twighlight) and pays them more heed, based around the radio, with squrls and squiggles, thrums and buzzes over it, but within a more consistent palette and subdued variation. Pauline is a shorter one based on soft rumbles and almost music tones (that echo around your skull) with some edgy sounds behind, before the long final track (over 17 minutes). 7/18/07 approximately 8:33 pm moves on from Static blanket and takes the subtle weaving and playing within a radio recording to an extended length to create a strong piece of restrained ambience: there are sounds in here that you do want to hear. These two tracks are like a journey through the night accompanied by a shortwave radio with its own mind. The coherent, more restrained sections of this album are excellent: and they make up the bulk of it. The noisier, seemingly less considered tracks have their own attraction, but they set up a barrier to the (this) listener through their hyperactivity. There is enough here, however, to offer most ears some satisfying, interesting and confronting listening. Play loud to disorient and confuse yourself, or more quietly for a perhaps more rewarding experience. - Jeremy Keens
(Sound Projector) On this, Joseph Jaros and Luke Polipnick manipulate radio waves, samples and murmuring feedback on tracks like ‘Static Blanket Transmissions’ to sustain compelling moods. - Ed Pinsent
(KZSU Zookeeper) Analog synth noise, treatments, creepy and harsh in places, subtle and ambient in others. Use of strange samples (including a toddler’s voice) just creeps it all out even more. Great stuff.
1) brief, starts quiet but turns noisy
2) chill and blippy for first minute then turns into harsh “radio frequency tuning”-like, more electronics all over the map, difficult, then chills out again 2/3 way through with cool electronics
3) very synth, piercing high freqs here and there, with unnerving samples of childs voice smattered
4) continuation of previous, toddler voice with creepy synth
5) starts chill, becomes a symphony, ode, to the analog synth, then indecipherable male voice really fucks with your head
6) mostly very chill with bursts of difficult tones
7) heavy white noise/ambience, bursts of noise, harsh high freqs, epic - Your Imaginary Friend
(Vital Weekly) Giraffe, a duo of Joseph Jaros and Luke Polipnick, and as said, no information. They are a noisy bunch of lads on their 'Hear Here'. It's hard to say what sound sources are at their disposal, but things are pretty loud and distorted. A certain interesting low fidelity quality is to be detected in these recordings, voices from radio, the same radio that is fed through a bunch of distortion pedals. However for whatever odd reason I also think they use a computer as a means of producing the noise. All of the proceedings are delivered through methods of improvisation and no editing, which is fashionable in these areas and which is a pity, since not every moment is very strong, me thinks. With some cut and paste it could have been a much more interesting work. - Frans de Waard
(Dead Angel) Giraffe is the duo of Joseph Jaros and Luke Polipnick, and they specialize in cryptic sound collages heavy on blips and bloops, light on linear construction or easy digestibility. Their largely subdued collages are built from a wide range of esoteric sounds, some of it found, some likely field recordings, some of it strange noises made from unidentifiable objects; on some tracks like "Forever 1" they incorporate noise that's by turns crunchy (or as on "Forever 2," high-pitched and augmented by reverbed snippets of conversation). If there's a "logic" to their approach, it isn't readily apparent; most of the work here sounds deliberately random, and the longer pieces have stretches of near-ambient hum and noise that are interrupted at unpredictable intervals by strange sounds and bits of harsh / glitch noise. "Static Blanket Transmission" introduces, appropriately, static into the mix, along with droning effects that rise and fall and other peculiar sounds that float in and out of the background. The closing track, "7/18/07 approximately 8:33 pm," is the longest track on the disc (clocking in at just under eighteen minutes) and incorporates all the anti-musical antics that have come before while also including tantalizing, faraway pieces of what sounds like an acoustic guitar passage along with an increasingly level of noise frippery. Strange, exotic stuff that's very much on the avant-garde fringe. - RKF
(Touching Extremes) “Composed in real time”. Now that’s an expression that I appreciate. It’s true: some improvisations sound, well, improvised; other ones could indeed be exchanged for compositions. The third case is that many improvisations are shit, but this is not the right moment for a tirade. Joseph Jaros and Luke Polipnick generated this nicely bubbling brew while probably having fun, since the resulting music is very lively, intelligently concocted and variegated enough to sustain the attention test, although not without pauses. Circuit bending and tape alteration would seem to be the name of the game (just guessing - the sleeve doesn’t help and I’m not willing to surf at 9:30 AM). There are additional kinds of oddities, too, such as a syllable-uttering baby appearing out of nowhere at one point amidst sci-fi noise and humming warfare. Mixtures of distorted emissions, piercing shrieks, electronic pulses, even beautifully unusual radioactive frequencies. An FM station tries to unwrap from the mud in the last track. Untranslatable blather and nerve-stimulating dynamic shifts flying all around during one’s try to give a sense to a Sunday morning besides feeding the cats and watching the fight taped the evening before. A day at Cape Canaveral after the officers have smoked quite a lot of pot; the astronauts are still waiting for technical advice from ground control, yet more likely they will end like Major Tom. - Massimo Ricci
(Aiding and Abetting) Joseph Jaros and Luke Polipnick improvising their way through found sound, samples and some stuff that, on rare occasions, sounds a bit like "normal" music. I like the way they kinda flit in and out of consciousness. I'm not sure if this is supposed to approximate a harried brain settling down to sleep or is simply meant to sound cool. Either way, I like it. - Jon Worley
(Ragazzi) Hinter GIRAFFE steckt erneut Joseph Jaros zusammen mit Luke Polipnick, die ihre ‚andere' Musik in Lincoln, Nebraska, machen. Jaros ist Multiinstrumentalist und auch aktiv mit Howloosenation und Howard, Fine, Howard, Polipnick spielt Gitarre bzw. Drums oder Laptop etwa mit Volcano Insurance und in Nagaoag, einem Duo mit Bryan Day. Wenn man ihrer Einladung Hear Here (eh?29, CD-R) folgt, hört man durchwegs irdische Geräusche, Vögel, Radioschnipsel, Babytalk, elektronisches Knurschen, Wabern und defekten Sprechfunk, der nur noch ein stottriges Zirpen ist. Den noisigen, furzelnden Verlaufsformen und stechend zickzackenden Störungen merkt man die Freude an chaotischen, kinderfreundlichen Verhältnissen an, die sich weder um Fidelity noch um Selbstdisziplin schert. - rbd
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