Gui Boratto

It will forever seem ironic that Gui Boratto’s breakout album was titled Chromophobia—meaning “fear of color”—only because the Brazilian producer makes some of the most richly hued dance music out there. Born in São Paulo in 1974, Boratto started out in the dance-pop group Sect in the mid-’90s, but by the mid-2000s, he began releasing sleek dance-floor cuts like 2005’s “Arquipelago” that elegantly combined the grooves of minimal techno with the lush tones of progressive house. By 2007’s Chromophobia, on Cologne’s titanic Kompakt label, his sound was fully formed, capturing eyes-wide euphoria in buoyant melodies, cascading arpeggios, and spine-tingling sound design. Over the years and across multiple albums for Kompakt, the balance of Boratto’s music has shifted to and fro, emphasizing skeletal shapes on 2009’s Take My Breath Away and swinging back to big, trancey melodies on 2014’s Abaporu and 2018’s Pentagram. What has stayed constant is his commitment to capturing the full sweep of the rainbow in every supersaturated song.