Presumably buying some time between LPs, Brazilian house producer Gui Boratto’s Azzurra EP remixes a track from last year’s excellent Take My Breath Away and adds two previously unreleased cuts. The title track’s cheeky label “Not the Same Version” refers to a lyric of the added vocals, one of the few significant departures from the original track. Bass guitar and denser drum loops are the others, augmenting the original’s bittersweet Casio hooks without really eliminating anything. As a result, the warm, inside-on-a-rainy-day pop ambience of “Azzurra” becomes more of a song — more club-ready, but also a bit less inviting.
The new cuts follow suit, continuing the minimal techno of Take My Breath Away with just a touch of menace. “Telecaster”, the better of the two, employs a melodic bait-and-switch: just when the familiarly melancholic chord progression is about to resolve, it diffuses into further tension. A reverberated guitar enters the mix about halfway through, introducing a dusky mystery to the producer’s trademark futurism. The propulsive beat’s insistent throb is all that’s left by the end, closing the EP on a cliffhanger that whets our appetite for deeper, darker Gui Boratto in the future.