DJ N**** Fox: Chá Preto LP

On one of the year's most staggering weirdo club records, Príncipe MVP Rogério Brandão sets expressive new levels for batida/kuduro and progressive African dance music with an extraordinary set of slow/fast and humid head-wreckers that sound like some indescribable melt of Matias Aguayo/Closer Musik, Villalobos and futuristic funk. 

‘Chá Preto’ invites the dance to the furthest reaches of DJ N-Fox’s imagination. Since debuting in 2013, the Lisbon-based artist has been a radical force in contemporary club music, physically making everyone move to his different beat and vibe. Perhaps best compared to Nídia in his field for an ability to juice unique motion and emotion from his music, in ‘Chá Preto’ he follows his nose for outright weird and singular style and pattern on all counts, seducing the mind/body with liquified syncopations and synth sensations that just feel alien and highly satisfying to even the hardest-to-please quibblers.

On his first mission since 2022, Brandão follows the form of his ‘Música Da Terra’ EP and a string of Warp bullets into the beyond. The spectral carousel of lop-sided subs and haunted fairground melodies in ‘Ondas da Terra’ is slow and screwed, like several tracks cut in concentric circles and playing off one another, battling the grid, before ‘Má Rotina’ pushes a more bittersweet sort of bloozy introspection with clipped West African rhythms trotting on bombed out bass laced with ambient pads and a hooky chant that sets up ‘Mutadoree’ on a tip like Lolina adrift in Yorgos Lanthimos’ oneiric depiction of Lisbon in ‘Poor Things’, conveying fantastical feelings we can’t quite translate, or fathom.

‘Bom Te Ver’ recalls Marina Rosenfeld’s electro-dub as if kerned by Autechre’s AI, while the diffracted flow of the closing ‘4 Fantasias’ most strongly reminds us of Closer Musik’s ‘You Don’t Know Me’ alltimer with its humid landscaping and sensual, snake-charming melodies. 

There’s just nowt like it out there right now.