Nidia 95 Mindjeres

‘95 MINDJERES’ (“95 women” in crioulo) is Nídia’s most charged album yet, taking its cues from the women
freedom fighters - like Titina Silá and Teodora Gomes - who helped bring Guinea-Bissau to independence
from Portuguese colonial rule in the 1960s and ‘70s. To realise this vision, the producer braids lilting, West
African thuds into stimulating electronic prangs; the spirit has been focused into a knifepoint that cuts
straight into the heart. She asks “it’s like?” on opener ‘É COMO?’, goading us into a search for comparisons.
The truth is she’s completely out on her own, chopping and experimenting with the form as she waltzes with
familiar elements - hand drums, woodblocks, neon stabs.
Nídia interrupts the flood for a moment on ‘Caiomhe’ pushing resonant, clattering percussion into the centre,
before embracing a Berlin-ready warehouse groove on ‘To La’, shattering its darkness with wafting guitar
licks and zig-zagging shakers. It’s during these moments that her motivations are most perceptible, as she
shows her deep knowledge of Euro-washed club forms and pierces them with conspicuous emotion: joy,
melancholy and indignation. There are traces of Detroit’s sci-minded futurism left in the DNA of ‘Sukuku’, with
its rolling synths and euphoric pads, but Nídia shuttles these elements into a disparate zone, chopping and
stuttering the rhythm and never dragging things out for longer than they need. We can hear reverberations of
Innerzone Orchestra’s epochal ‘Bug in the Bass Bin’ here, split with Afro-Portuguese rhythms instead of jazz,
and the result is expectedly transcendent.
We’re even treated to a rare DJ tool with ‘cp’, a self-aware drum track that’s open and unaccompanied
enough to work as a floor-filling weapon. Nídia’s percussive skills are fully on show here as she develops a
hypnotic bounce from tonally rich clacks that provide their own melodic accompaniment. On ‘Mindjeres’,
she uses invigorating flute sounds and mbira-like chimes to suggest a more heavyhearted mood, before
dialing serrated FM synths into tremulous thuds on ‘abcd’. And to bring us to a close, Nídia deploys her most
widescreen cut to date. ‘Paradise’ - a slow-paced epic that opens with a wash of Art of Noise-style pads and
builds to a low, slow warble with trapdoor kicks and pointillistic stabs. Tense but deliriously heady, it’s the
perfect finale to an album that’s immensely uplifting, energising, unforgettable,