Is Gui Boratto – an architect, producer and composer – a bit of an overachiever? He has remixed Bomb the Bass, Goldfrapp, the Pet Shop Boys and Scsi 9. In a sense all the hats are on for Take My Breath Away: it is highly structured in form and effect, purposeful and direct. Opening with the title track this album shows its form, highly wrought sound display for audio effect. In a sense a description of the form it takes is almost irrelevant, the sensual and emotive effect it takes is key. However, it holds greatly in the realms of the emotive melodic minimal techno, plundering years of phrasing, melody and sensibility, Borrato throws back generic sound motifs and recycles them pristinely into popular form. It takes the genre to the pop world with few or no regrets.
Indeed the track No Turning Back, with it’s ‘insightful’ lyrics can only truly be heard in this arena. Atomic Sodawith its pristine sculptured beat bounces in an uneventful manner and moves hoovering bass tone variations in a manner that would massage the average dancers internal organs in the very large soundsystem space. Moments of ‘romanticism’ in sound arrive in the track Colours which essentially is a combination of simple and quite annoying keyboard call and response phrases, an overplayed piano stab motif, underwritten by a retro and slightly annoying beat. On Ballroom and Eggplant Borrato is at his most honest and direct, in it’s house leaning techno roots, and in playing sound and beat to the full extent of the audiences need to dance.
This album is a foray into large soundsystem formalism, almost overly designed for effect, it utilises it’s sound template as an ends in itself. Indeed, I can picture it’s use on 10,000 or so swaying, sweating, pounding minimal techno adherents enthralled by the emotive euphoric nature of it all. My speakers are hardly adequate enough to give the full sense of this justice. To play it at home almost questions why to have a copy, other than as a momento of the experience, the audio thrills and spills of the dance floor with thousands of your closest friends. This said wryly, and it had to be, for when you know your emotions are being manipulated for full effect it does not really matter who is doing it, an advertiser, a politican or a musician, it still leaves a strange taste or effect. After all the bluster and show Gui leaves you with Godet, the come down track, to help you adjust to a less energetic and more thoughtful world. It almost fools you into believing that you have not just been taken for a high fidelity ride of the senses. File under high production value audio porn.
