In step with the more polished production advances of their label mates, Lisbon’s DJ Kolt, DJ Noronha, and DJ Perigoso - aka Blacksea Não Maya - arrive 5 years on from their previous showing with a remarkably darker, muscular take on mutated Angolan dance music. Fiercely technoid and blessed with a newfound sense of late night drama, the sound of ‘Máquina de Vénus’ is exactly how we imagine this sound in 2020; reflecting the march of the machines and cosmic events beyond anyone’s control in their slickly mechanised rhythms and infectiously brooding atmospheres.
Like the leaps and bounds in production values and intricate arrangements found on the DJ Nigga Fox and Nídia albums over the past year, Blacksea Não Maya keep pace in their own way, working to ruggedly squashed variations of Tarraxho and Batida styles that come to recall the developments of the UK’s hardcore continuum during the ‘90s into the late ‘00s. But where that scene arguably ran out of energy a long time ago, Blacksea Não Maya boldly charge it into an uncertain future.
Kicking off with the beastly detonations and hulking slow techno of ‘Terror’, they swing hard off-the-bone in ‘Obscure’, and weave in hard trap and reggaeton nods on ’Tchiling District’ to set the tone on the A-side, before the lustrous cyber-noir licks and choral pads of ‘Horizonte’ open the B-side to the slow, dive-bombing synths and the industrial-tarraxho swag of ‘Bubadagash’, a bubbling technoid stepper named ‘Africanalidade’, and for terrific measure, the positive rave upswing of ‘Estranhos e Loucos’ with its speed garage-style vocal chops and head high jackers pressure.