EP Review: Alex Burkat – Tarot

Out this week on the Los-Angeles based label 100% Silk, Tarot arrives from the mind of Brooklynite musician Alex Burkat. The four-track EP, purportedly inspired by “mysticism and global warming,” loops its way through half an hour of moody beat-scene hypnotica and misty subterranean house-sound. Like an ancestral diviner of the fantastical and unknown, “Tarot” pounds its over-driven kick-beat, beckoning timorous synths and exotic percussive swaths out from their hiding places, until all these invoked elements have morphed together into a mindless dance-floor track. The same warehouse thud and billowing ambiance conjures the nocturnal grooves of “Last Cigarette,” which glows moodily like a lantern in the dark with its distant synth-calls, liquescent textures and and enervated percussion. Then there is the majestic new-age build of the mysteriously-strobing “Four Seasons” and the brighter-lit Global Warming Mix, which cascades cackling textures over its unwavering jungle-percussion. There is a little something lacking to the spirit of these tracks that might otherwise elevate Burkat’s music beyond the usual experimental-house, but it still manages to cast quite the spell of its own.