Matias Aguayo
The Visitor
Release Date: Jun 25, 2013
Genre(s): Electronic, Techno, Club/Dance, Experimental Techno, Left-Field House
Record label: Cómeme
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Album Review: The Visitor by Matias Aguayo
Very Good, Based on 8 Critics
Based on rating 4.5
Chilean producer Matias Aguayo is a globalized musician in the truest sense. Aguayo’s sound is a rich melting pot of textures, sounds and rhythms informed by a long career travelling the world working at the progressive end of electronic music. Aguayo’s third album The Visitor is something a little different. It’s a slight stylistic step away from the techno-rooted sounds of his early work in Cologne as part of production duo’s Zimt and Closer Musik, as well as his first two solo albums released through Kompakt.
Based on rating 4.0/5
After 2008's slyly funny "Minimal" saw Matias Aguayo turning his back on the increasingly sterile world of minimal techno (which he'd inhabited as one half of Closer Musik), the Chilean producer seemed to find his own voice on 2009's Ay Ay Ay. Quite literally, given the album had him twisting his tongue over all manner of eccentric grooves, often letting it stray close to his cheek. And now, for the follow-up, Aguayo has found plenty of other people's voices, too.
Based on rating 4/5
2009’s ‘Ay Ay Ay’ revealed Chilean/German maverick Matias Aguayo as an adorably odd fish, bubbling through a psychedelic swamp of South American cumbia, proto-dance music, tropicália and post-punk’s odder corners. His profile raised further by ‘Ice Cream’, his collaboration with kindred freaks Battles, ‘The Visitor’ really stakes a claim. Right from the silly, scary opener ‘RRRR’, it’s daft, hypnotic, erotic, evil and unhinged all at once.
Based on rating 8/10
After the release of 2009's Ay Ay Ay, Matias Aguayo granted vocals to diverse tracks by Battles ("Ice Cream"), Discodeine ("Singular"), Daniel Maloso ("Right Kind"), and Baio ("Tanto"). He also knocked out a 12" for Kompakt and spent years assembling this, his third solo album, as he stopped in Argentina, Colombia, France, Mexico, and Germany to snare nearly 20 friends -- vocalists and percussionists -- for contributions. Issued on his Berlin-based Cómeme label, The Visitor is Aguayo's loosest, looniest, and most layered album.
Based on rating 7/10
On his first two solo releases (2005's Are You Really Lost? and 2009's Ay Ay Ay), Matias Aguayo experimented with his voice, building rhythmic techno tracks from verbal ticks, affects, yelps and oddball melodies. On The Visitor, the third full-length from the Chilean/German maximalist, Aguayo finally finds that sweet spot between his latest ventures into rhythmic phrasing and his early microhouse beginnings as one half of Closer Musik. Working with a number of collaborators, most notably Deadbeat, who helped mix the album's 12 tracks, The Visitor comes off as much leaner and more heavily structured than his earlier material.
Based on rating 3/5
Chilean-German producer Matias Aguayo's watershed rejection of minimal techno – the mischievously mocking Minimal – is now five years old, but it still feels as though he's reiterating the point. Subsequent releases have been pointedly playful – and The Visitor, Aguayo's third solo album, finds him once again using manic percussion and comic voices to underline his music's humour and personality. It's a significant improvement on 2009's Ay Ay Ay: rather than wackiness for the sake of it, Aguayo's integration of Latin rhythms and cacophony of vocal stylings – chants, raps, spoken word, purrs, growls – capture something of the spontaneous spirit of his BumBumBox street raves.
Based on rating 3/5
He is 40 now, but Chilean-born, German-raised guerrilla rave instigator Matias Aguayo is a classic nomad. At home everywhere and nowhere, the techno producer's third album under his own name is The Visitor, a post-digital block party full of computer music whose Latinate rhythms and rolled Rs don't conform to grid or template. Half-sung, half-rapped in Spanish and English, Una Fiesta Diferente illustrates how Aguayo's dancefloor nous can effortlessly give rise to a pop tune.
Based on rating 5.9/10
Matias Aguayo has always been a goof, the type of jump-on-the-table artist who's having way more fun than you. He depends on this persona for his scatterbrained takes on house and electro; it takes more than a little charm and panache to get someone up on that table with you. So it's problematic that it feels like Aguayo's laboring for long stretches of his third album, The Visitor.
'The Visitor'
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