An action-packed, succinct thirty-five minutes, it’s one of those rare dance records that sounds just as great at home because there’s just too much going on to simply get lost in the rhythm. Buy at Amazon, iTunes or Juno.
This is the first ever new-music release for self-described “retro-tropical reissues label” Soundway and a better fit is hard to imagine. Batida, a Brazilian fruit cocktail which basically means “shaken,” is also the moniker originally hung on indigenous electric dance music in early 80s Luanda. It is genuine syncretism, incorporating Western, African and Caribbean beats, especially the Cuban ones which came with the troops Castro sent to help shore up the Communist government in the mid-seventies.
Batida, the album, sprang from the mind of Angolan-Portuguese DJ Mpula and features a host of guest artists, including “conscious kuduro” artist Sacerdote, poet Ngongo and Lisbon producer Beat Laden. Sampling tracks from 1970s Angolan tapes with a distinct, unrelenting contemporary beat, he hosts one hell of a party. But the album gives plenty of room to the “liberation music” so important to the Angolan people, like “Bazuka (Quem Me Rusgou?),” which features an ex-soldier interviewed in the street questioning his leaders, and the rapper MCK, a dissenting voice of such stature that he was recently profiled in The Economist.
The production purposely mixes tinny radio acoustics with gleaming clarity and beautifully confuses time periods. Highlife guitar—at its highest and livliest on “Saudade”—clipped, rapid beats, those ingeniously integrated original recordings sampled or looped and a cascade of voices. The gloriously candy-coloured cartoon electronica on “Tirei O Chapéu” features a Moog bass so low and flatulent it sounds like the world’s biggest tuba. “Puxa” is a perfect mix of the fun, fascination and fear that a barely under control carnival evokes. It is also the track that most clearly exposes the soca roots deep in Angolan dance music.
An action-packed, succinct thirty-five minutes, it’s one of those rare dance records that sounds just as great at home because there’s just too much going on to simply get lost in the rhythm.
Batida is available on Soundway. Buy at Amazon, iTunes or Juno.
