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Doubtless you already know Argenis Brito, whether you're aware of it or not. This
versatile Venezuelan musician and singer has blazed an indelible path across the
Americas and Europe for over 20 years, first in the Latin American rock scene and,
since the mid-'90s, as a collaborator and comrade-in-arms of many of the artists that
have given contemporary electronic dance music a Latin twist. Moving from Caracas to
New York to Santiago de Chile to Berlin, and having toured the world multiple times,
Brito brings a uniquely rootless sensibility to his unconventional brand of house music.
Since the turn of the decade, Brito has been the
featured vocalist and touring bandleader for Uwe
Schmidt's Señor Coconut project. Alongside Pier
Bucci he has recorded two albums and several
singles as Mambotur, and with Bucci and
Luciano, he co-produced four tracks for Monne
Automne's 2003 album. Before all of this there was
his groundbreaking work alongside Chilean
stadium rocker Jorge Gonzalez in the
experimental electronic pop project Gonzalo
Martinez, which also featured contributions from
Atom Heart, Dandy Jack and Tobias Freund. And
most recently Brito has pursued a dirtier house
sensibility, as a member of The Basstards, Krak
Street Boyz and Argenix vs. Samim.
Micro Mundo, Brito's first appearance on
Cadenza, finds him finessing and refining his
sound, honing it down to a carefully restrained
groove that occasionally erupts into madness,
snapping and hissing like a live wire.
"Espejismo" sets the tone with a no-nonsense
stomp, a hypnotic bassline snaking through it, and
eerie flashes of digital noise, aural equivalents of
the mirage of the title. "Amplified" takes those
elements and ratchets them up a notch, machine
voices bubbling up from the murk and fizzy microrhythms
zooming across the stereo field. It's not an
entirely new sound for Cadenza; in the precisiontooled
sound design and the propulsive groove
you'll hear echoes of Luciano, Digitaline, Andomat
3000 & Jan…. But Brito's style really is his alone,
hovering somewhere between classic house and
Casio quirk. "Cepe" demonstrates this hi/lo fusion
with toy keyboards and a lazy voice exhorting
dancers to "Move it up!"
And then somewhere on the B-side, something
happens: things get weirder. Darker. "Uricao"
floats on the fumes of a detuned tom and spooky,
skeletal congas, even as jaunty bass stabs tug
things back to cartoonland. "Mala Conducta" is
haunted by ghostly echoes and ragged
synthesizers and freaky little bells and whistles -
it's Raymond Scott meets Jamie Principle, in dub. "Headlight", "Disconet," and "Sensorial" close
out the double-EP with three more variations on
the theme, juggling sub-bass whoomp, fidgety
machine drumming and bright, inspired melodic
flourishes that go pinwheeling off like fireworks,
inspiring dancers to move - any and every damn
way they please.
That's Micro Mundo: A world in miniature, a
flickering orb, a buzzing hive teeming with 1s and
0s and raw analog waveforms, flashes of life
connecting the motherboard to the Mothership.
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