DJ Nigga Fox Chá Preto

‘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’ the artist follows his nose for outright weird and singular style and pattern on all counts, prompting mind/body with liquified syncopations and synth sensations that simply feel strange and satisfying to even the hardest-to-please raver or oddbeat chin stroker. On his first mission since 2022, DJ N-Fox follows the form of his ‘Música Da Terra’ EP and a string of Warp bullets into the beyond. The spectral carousel of lop-sided subbass and haunted fairground melodies in ‘Ondas da Terra’ pick straight up from his previous, 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 an ohrwurming chant that sets up ‘Mutadoree’ on a tip like Lolina adrift in Yorgos Lanthimos’ oneiric depiction of Lisbon in ‘Poor Things’ and conveys fantastical feelings we can’t quite translate, whilst ‘Bom Te Ver’ reminds us of Marina Rosenfeld’s electro-dub kerned by Æ’s AI, and the final couplet of bitersweet nosedrip synth in ’Wanguila’ and the skudged yet effervescent murk and diffracted flow of ‘4 Fantasias’ leave us in no doubt to Brandão’s outré brilliance