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  Fujiya & Miyagi - The Pike Room, October 4By Daniel JohnsonOctober 4, 2007 They call it Motorik. When the beat is driving and buyuoant; when the soft focus synths cruise out from the horizon straight at you like an Autobahn breeze through your windswept hair; when the pulse is so steady it fills you with equal parts wander and lust; they call it Motorik. And last night Fujiya & Miyagi brought plenty of Motorik to the Pike Room - the smallest of three venues nestled in Pontiac's new gorgeously furnished Crofoot Ballroom complex. With an onstage machine-to-man ratio of nearly 2:1, the English trio played a set built for dancing and it sounded both deep and bright through the room's crisp acoustics and quality sound system (a rarity these days for Metro Detroit). Fujiya do a few things and they do them well. Steve Lewis and Matt Hainsby man the keyboard and low-end decks, leaving singer David Best free to spit-whisper his mantras. He purrs his lyrics at a nearly inaudible volume, mixing in a liberal dose of French and sounding playfully lecherous, like Serge Gainsborough practicing his lines in front of a mirror. The tension in Fujiya's sound is all about restraint - about propulsive grooves played with air-tight control at sex-friendly bpms - and their slow-hand disco and 8-bit afrobeat somehow keep one foot on the gas and one on the brakes. It's a little Neu! A little Kraftwerk. And, when Best dices the beat with a shot of clipped funk guitar, it's even a little INXS. But above all it's clean, and Fujiya & Miyagi's German-engineered sound mixed beautifully tonight with the Crofoot's fresh, wood-paneled ambiance. Pontiac never felt so exotic.
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