This review was going to write itself: "Matias Aguayo killed minimal dead," it would read, this on the heels of Aguayo's 2008 star turn, "Minimal", in which he convicted his home genre of growing stale. It was an easy plotline: The man who helped popularize and expand minimal-- a seminal contributor, as one half of Closer Musik, to Kompakt's early discography, and author of 2005's still-underheard Are You Really Lost-- would, with Ay Ay Ay, re-order our expectations for minimal's future. Ay Ay Ay explodes that meme, however, with an album so far removed from Aguayo's past-- it's a record of maximal, fermented oddity-- that it borders on the bizarre.
Ay Ay Ay is an album composed mostly of the human voice, continuing Aguayo's penchant for silly/sexy singspeak but filling out the rest of the compositions with throaty squelches, triple-tracked a cappella nonsense, and sampled chants. More than simply "that techno guy who sings," Aguayo seems to have developed a childlike fascination with the human voice on par with Timbaland, Rahzel, or (frequent collaborator) DJ Koze. Because of its sparse percussion, preponderance of voices-- chatting, yelling, singing-- and Chilean-born Aguayo's tendency to sing in Spanish, Ay Ay Ay often feels like world music, though less in a 1980s-Borders-Books-and-Music-endcap sense and more because it sounds well-traveled and totally foreign.
Foreign as in unfamiliar: Ay Ay Ay sounds like no other album this year, and it's no stretch to say it's one of the most out-of-character releases ever for Kompakt. Any discussion of musical influence almost seems superfluous, however, as Aguayo spends much of Ay Ay Ay proving his credentials as an inspired goofball. Lead track "Menta Latte", which barrels out of the gate with whumping bass voices, sounds like a group of skilled six year-olds putting Saturday morning to song. "Koro Koro" is Soweto-style pop undercut by compressed, clacking beats. The title track is stepping tropic pop. The clingy "Rollerskate" is disarmingly coherent in its form and presumed function: it sounds like rollerskating.
"Rollerskate" is easily the most parse-able jam; I don't speak Spanish, but Aguayo's history indicates that the rest of the lyrics are husky shit-talk and/or crappy come-ons. It's hard to wonder what else would fit into the hum-hum-grind of "Desde Rusia" or the Talking-Heads-on-E of "Ritmo Tres".
If Aguayo's electronic background rears its head, it does so abstractly, as long stretches of the hour-long Ay Ay Ay can dissolve into prattling sound-soups, the clicks and thumps of the producer's previous work replaced with tongue-snaps and party favor whoops ("Mucho Viento"). Despite the expectations for the record, Ay Ay Ay doesn't redraw the lines of minimal electronic music. Naturally, it's not trying to. It does reroute our conception of Aguayo, however. Ay Ay Ay is a sticky-sweet, unbounded mess, but only the priggish and unimaginative will hold that against it.
