About

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 Contrafacção" 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.

"Amigão" weds eerie swing-era saxophones to techno's hypnotic electronic pulses. While Furto has an identifiable "sound" strategy, Sentimento switches things up so often, it's 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 Out's 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 // AllMusic

Residing in Rio de Janeiro, Vasconcelos Sentimento is a self-taught composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist. A mosaic of lo-fi breaks, cosmic ambient jazz and wonky chromatic funk, the eccentric Brazilian DIY wizard’s debut album Furto beautifully pieces together a huge range of seemingly disparate sonic elements. Calling himself an “amateur euphoric sound researcher”, he has no formal training in either music theory or production, and it’s simply by following his ear that has led him to creating his debut album for Far Out Recordings.

It was his fascination with his fellow countryman, the enigmatic, psychedelic 70s folk artist Jose Mauro, that led the young Vasconcelos Sentimento (real name Guilherme Esteves) to first make contact with Far Out. Coincidentally living in the same region as Mauro, Sentimento managed to track him down and put label boss Joe Davis in touch, after Davis had spent years of what felt like hopeless searching for the man many assumed dead.

When Joe and the Far Out team heard Guilhermes’ own music, there was a sense of shock. “It was unlike anything we’d heard before, but it also sounded curiously at home on Far Out. Like it had taken little pieces of different releases from the catalogue, and all the music from the ‘60s onwards that influences everything we do, and recreated all that magic in such an exciting new way”. - Bandcamp