gui boratto, “it’s majik”

Today on Pitchfork, the venerable Andy Battaglia called Brazilian electronic musician Gui Boratto’s new album Chromophobia “one of the three or four best artist-albums to bear the Kompakt stamp,” Kompakt being the esteemed Cologne microhouse label. As he always is, Battaglia is very, very right. It’s a wonderful record, albeit one unavailable on eMusic. Fortunately for us, however, Boratto’s best song, “It’s Majik,” is.

As alluded to in my Superpitcher post a week back, Boratto very much comes from the same school as the German microhouse crew. He toys with that same schaeffel beat, a sound Battalgia cleverly calls a “sleight-of-speed phenomenon,” which is another way of saying house music based on the seamless grooviness of glam.

“It’s Majik” (download it here; that’s a command, not a request!) is nine minutes of hard-swinging schaeffel deftly topped with vocals that recall a lethargic Steve Miller, that anesthetized, monotoned vocal style that has helped make Miller’s hits popular for hip-hop DJs (seriously, put him next to the anti-charismatic Akon or Sean Paul and it totally makes sense!). Normally Miller + schaeffel would be plenty to carry a track, but here we get calculated builds and sine wave keyboard washes and that beautiful moment at the 4:18 mark when the beat becomes implied by slight pulsations, sloooooowly crescendoing to a five-minute climax. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to hear this thing.