Cyclic Defrost

The debut LP from Gui Boratto is finally released on Kompakt. Economic and tidy electronica with personality. Boratto’s 2005 single Arquipélago was a less-is-more minimal dancefloor burner, this album runs with similiar warm and full textures, clean sounds and resolved tonalities. Subtle changes in rhythm and timbre let tracks groove and unfurl without resorting to dance music cliches, and while the album begins with techy, glitchy club tracks like ‘Terminal’ and ‘Gate 7′, the album also veers off into more unexpected directions: groovy guitar riff territory of tracks like ‘Xilo’, and the immersive shoegaze of ‘Beautiful Life’. Boratto’s restrained production works well against his solid rhythms. All of the 13 songs on this album are built around superb percussion tracks, everything is produced with room to breathe, letting the natural groove emerge from crisp synthetic textures.

Vaughan Healey

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