If there is one common characteristic in the archetypal Kompakt sound, it's the practice of making dance tracks sound as if they're moving at several different speeds at once. This is the reason why Kompakt ambassador Michael Mayer is associated as much with heavy-lidded deep-hour sway as he is with peak anthems. The sleight-of-speed phenomenon has been easy to identify in the years since the Kompakt sound grew big and momentous, but it goes all the way back to the beginning, in 1998, when "minimalism" meant not only distilling sounds down to their essence but also reevaluating the prescribed effects of those sounds as they were employed. If a formative Kompakt track trafficked in nothing more than clicks and taps, that didn't mean it was necessarily rhythmic in nature; by contrast, if another track was all beatless hums and smears, that didn't mean it didn't move.
Gui Boratto is a sleight-of-speed master, another name to add to the list topped by Superpitcher, Matias Aguayo, and anybody who ever made a schaffel track that transcended its novelty roots in glam-rock. It's tempting to attribute Boratto's touch to the fact that he's Brazilian-- what is Brazilian music, after all, if not dispersive and diaphanous even in its most antic modes? But Boratto's South American roots don't grow out like those of Chlieans Ricardo Villalobos or Luciano; he doesn't play with hand-drum runs or toy with wooden timbres. Boratto is more like Aguayo in the way he calls on big, trancey sounds and sets up enough space between them to let elision create arrangements on their own terms.
Boratto's inversion of speed and momentum played out in the track that made his name in the techno world: The Total 7 highlight "Arquipélago", which traffics in fleet hi-hat syncopation and a languorous synth line that trails far behind the action. The tug-of-war makes for a brooding kind of tension, and it's most noticeable when the war itself is over: About 3/4 the way through, the synth line falls out and the rhythmic patterns at work are literally catapulted forward in its absence.
That kind of ploy is at play all over Chromophobia, one of the three or four best artist-albums to bear the Kompakt stamp. "Scene" starts with a series of ambient trance ruffles, but from there it's all about concision and textures that creep into the folds and crevices, sounds you have to crane to notice otherwise. "Terminal" and "Gate 7" roll over tripped-up mid-tempo beats that measure as anything but mid-tempo, thanks to staccato synth riffs that yank them forward, while glacially patient backgrounds push them from behind. You can follow the highs for a glimmery rush, settle into the lows for a moody lull, or get lost somewhere in the middle to luxuriate in Boratto's sweet-spot.
It's a testament to the allure of Boratto's control that a song as whooshy and anthemic as "Beautiful Life" plays as a strange sort of liability in context. It's the lone song on Chromophobia with vocals-- dreamy female vocals about living life and seeing the sun that could cap an epic Felix Da Housecat album-- and it sounds out of place among a few mesmerizing but ill-suited epilogues tacked on near the end. Would that more missteps stepped so correctly, but Chromophobia is more about the subtle declarations of tension and release in a track like "The Blessing". It's an articulate mess of snare fills over a hi-hat that sounds simply happy to be there, and a slow, moody bass-line that won't be swayed to smile by any carnival happening off in the distance. It moves at several different speeds while sloughing off the impulse to pick just one.
