LA City Beat

Techno with Finesse
Brazil's Gui Boratto adds grace and style to the ol' boom-chick
By Dennis Romero

Techno music has come a long way since its Detroit birth in the early 1980s. The original sounds of Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson aimed somewhere between electro-flavored hip-hop and Sunday-sermon house music. It was futuristic, melodic machine soul.

Somewhere in the 1990s, though, techno lost its way. The sound crossed the Atlantic and became the grating, sometimes sophomoric soundtrack to rave culture (Altern-8, anyone?). Soon the word techno seemed to describe cheesy dance pop, an unfortunate connotation. Fortunately, a new wave of “minimal” techno producers, often taking their cues from German label Kompakt, has emerged around the globe, helped by the Internet and highly portable music-making software. The techno of today, thankfully, is a lot like the techno of yesterday – tuneful and forward-thinking.

Perhaps no one has put as fresh a twist on the new sound of techno as Brazil’s Gui Boratto, a onetime studio whiz who burst on the scene with a heavenly long player, Chromophobia, released last year on Kompakt. The album’s sense of movement and grace suggests shades of classical influences yet complements the shuffle and boom of contemporary tech-house rhythms.

“Terminal” is a mischievous, explosive soundtrack for pussyfooting around the warehouse underground. The title track is an ominous digital rendering of Amazonian percussion. The jewel of Chromophobia, “Beautiful Life,” is a revelatory ice cream headache, ready-made for film scores and commercials. It’s like the spirit of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” was channeled through postmodern sound production. Those and 10 other tracks propelled Boratto’s debut collection to many critics’ best-of-’07 lists and spawned two remix albums. And all this is from a Sao Paulo musician who only started releasing dance music around 2004.

“I’m very happy for the results,” says the 34-year-old, “not just the reviews, but all the people who are really into the album at the clubs when I play.”

Boratto says his music is more accessible than typical techno because he has formal music training and years of experience engineering, mixing, and mastering pop artists. His maternal grandfather, he says, was a “great musician,” and his mother forced him to learn to play the piano. (“I thank her for sure,” he adds.) But his father, of Italian and German descent, was an engineer. Music was not a legit career in his household, so Gui studied architecture. Yet he never lost his musical flame. In 1988, he bought a Roland MC500 sequencer and a Yamaha DX7 sequencer – and by the time he graduated, he had so much experience making and recording music that a solid career in the recording studio was waiting for him.

Boratto went on to do major-label studio work for the likes of Garth Brooks, Steel Pulse, and several Brazilian stars. In 2003, he was asked to create a few remixes for a City of God remix soundtrack, and the results propelled him into clubland.

“The music I make, you can see the structure, even if it’s an instrumental,” Boratto says. “ You can see a verse and a pre-chorus and a chorus. The structure is kind of commercial. It’s not a typical techno track where nothing happens, nine minutes of boom-chick, boom-chick. In this way, it can be easier to accept for people who are not into the techno thing.”

Today he tours the globe as a quasi-DJ, playing only his music via laptop and Ableton Live performance software. His upcoming appearance at Avalon’s quarterly “Made in Brazil” party here on January 26 is a homecoming of sorts: Last summer he appeared at the club for a momentous show with Kompakt label head Michael Mayer (who pushed the night to 6 a.m.)

“I’m really excited, especially because the ‘Made in Brazil’ party is made for the Brazilian crowd,” Boratto says. “I’m really proud to be coming back.”

With Boratto’s music – including a new album in the works for ’09 – techno is coming back, too.

Avaland presents “Made in Brazil” with Gui Boratto, Sat., Jan. 26, at Avalon Hollywood, 1735 N. Vine St., Hollywood. 21+. $15 advance. Info: Avalonhollywood.com.