Poratz: 28.50
Electroton

Patrizio Orsini only established his Poratz project in 2008 so the persona is as fresh as the material comprising this twenty-nine EP. Carefully stitching together minute samples and beats into six glitch-funk electronic cuts, he shapes the material into heavily atmospheric, head-nodding set-pieces that hypnotically skip and crackle. His loop-heavy tracks exemplify a bit of that Prefuse-styled cut-and-paste aesthetic so beloved of instrumental hip-hop producers though, to his credit, Orsini tastefully refrains from overloading the tracks to excess. Having said that, the opener “Sal Linda” teems with so much detail, the effect is almost dizzying: in just over four minutes, snappy stutter-funk electronics and waves of whirr and click collide with gunshot punctuations, rattle-snake exhalations, clanking rhythms, and other sounds. A woman's interstitial “um” and other vocal fragments act as rhythmic punctuation against a bass-crawling pulse in “01” while the clubby “At Wu Pu” charts a course down a deep river of densely-textured funk swing. It's not all uptempo: “11” is an exercise in brooding, crackle- and static-drenched ambient whose sonar flickers have more in common with Raster-Noton than Stones Throw, and “Goodnight Cleveland” ends the set with a metronomic lesson in krautrock-styled hypnosis. 28.50's certainly a more than promising coming-out for Poratz; it'll be interesting to see if Orsini can extend that quality level to a full-length production.

November 2008