Furto＜限定盤＞

Furto is the debut long-player by 24-year-old producer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Vasconcelos Sentimento. Though he previously released tracks as Guilherme Esteves (his given name), none of them prepared listeners for the heady brew of canny, lo-fi breaks, cosmic, atmospheric jazz, and sidewinding chromatic funk on offer here. Sentimento is completely self-taught. His skill on saxophones, keyboards, bass, drums, guitars, samplers, drum machine, and a mixing desk are accomplished, not rudimentary. His tunes stand apart from virtually everything else on the Rio de Janeiro scene. The album title translates as theft in Portuguese, a term Sentimento is completely comfortable with: He considers himself an amateur euphoric sound researcher rather than a musician. His compositions employ sounds from many sources -- vintage MPB, samba, and jazz, house music, techno, Italian soundtracks, and much more. He will play over samples, then cut up and mix what emerges in wildly interesting combinations that he ultimately records in a bedroom studio. Most of these 22 pieces last between one and three minutes. Despite his rhythm and sound collisions, Sentimento creates a surprisingly catchy, coherent, often smooth groove canvas from seemingly disparate sources. Single Passarinho begins with treated horn dissonance that recalls Raymond Scott atop a shuffling series of breaks before introducing the main vamp on layered saxes, post-bop piano with loads of reverb, and percussion. Just as the groove bares its teeth, he winds it down with pastoral piano and ambient textures. Movimento commences with a snare and hi-hat shuffle, a bluesy tenor sax line answered by alto and a rumbling keyboard bass. As pulsing synths enter from the ether, the melody vanishes, giving way to a breathy modal vamp and ticking cymbal flow that sound like they came from a film score. The intro to Burkina sounds like saxophonist Johnny Hodges and pianist Duke Ellington fooling around with Harlem Nocturne, appended by loopy sonics and pregnant spaces; punctuated by gated synths, a spooky vibe emerges. With intricately layered breaks, slamming, fractured beats, spacious horns, and bumping bass, One for the Masta Digga sounds very much like a brief, souled-out tribute to Madlib. Doutor Contrafaccao creeps across post-bop to embrace MPB and ambient music and even bossa, while Batebate emerges with a vocal chorus before melting down into a rhythm collision of forro beats, samples, and spaced-out textures. Amigao weds eerie swing-era saxophones to technos hypnotic electronic pulses. While Furto has an identifiable sound strategy, Sentimento switches things up so often, its actually a comfort to have something to hold on to amid his ambitious, brief, labyrinthine compositions and wonky harmonic interludes. Furto is a dazzling debut that fits Far Outs aesthetic perfectly. Sentimento delves into musical history, rips its up, then re-envisions it for a new era while infecting said musical history with carefully considered, irreverent yet approachable futurism. ~ Thom Jurek