After a full saturation of electronic and experimental music over the last weekend in September at Decibel Festival, one might think I couldn’t handle another minute of beats. On the contrary, it has more clearly focused my attention on a quickly burgeoning field of musical growth, change, progression. It has also honed my ear to be more discerning when spinning a new platter of beats. Today, my crosshairs are trained on one pixie of a DJ from Barcelona by the alias of Clara Moto.

Her first offering is an EP titled Silently, which is regrettably aptly named, because it does little to stand out from the throngs of house producers currently on the scene. The title track is a pretty run-of-the-mill vocal house track. Moto’s vocals are sweet, but without any mousey frailty to their tone, yet feel as if they’d be better served in a different musical context. Also, they’re processed a bit flat with a reverb that doesn’t travel well. “Sancy Cat”, the next track, is danceable in the way that it doesn’t feel distinguishable from a lot of other house. It has the same four on the floor beat, simple melodic line of a few notes, some pitch-shifted little tweaky noises and double-timed cymbals that further encourage the dance. However, there’s little else to it. Overall, the EP gives the feeling of a club girl transforming herself into a DJ/producer, but just in the initial stages of metamorphosis. She hasn’t staked out her own real estate of sound. While there’s nothing wrong or ‘bad’ about Silently, it’s just hypnotically boring as it doesn’t dare to bring a fresh angle/perspective to house music.

Basically, if twenty minutes into hanging at a show the DJ set started to all sound like this record, you’d be hard pressed to convince me to stay. Maybe it’s because I’m “old” and never took ecstasy, but it just bores me to tears, which, by the way, has nothing to do with the quality of the music. Sadly for Clara Moto, my crosshairs are pretty true today.

-Gabriel Bogart