Normal Nada, a.k.a. Qraqmaxter CiclOFF, a.k.a. Erre Mente, is an elusive producer. Due to the tributary nature of connections, which construct and organize his “self,” harnessing a clear mental grasp of his identity is difficult.
Naturally, a lot can be said of Príncipe Discos and identity. By their own account, Príncipe is a record label “fully dedicated to releasing 100% real contemporary dance music coming out of [Lisbon], its suburbs, projects & slums. New sounds, forms and structures with their own set of poetics and cultural identity.” Howbeit, among the resounding collective resonance of Príncipe as a whole, Normal Nada suitably embodies a mode of thought characterized by the rise of a meta-cognitive representation of the self as a network of identities.
While according to Príncipe, Normal Nada’s music explores the “chemical balanced regimes of wake - sleep and the seductive dimensions between both,” the aptly titled Transmutação Cerebral (Cerebral Transmutation) can also be read according to the changing of the intellect’s condition and the emergence of the self as a system of interrelated elements — in the case of Normal Nada, a “meta-kuduro” legend.
Indeed, Normal Nada’s universal identity draws in afro-trance, zouk, tarraxinha, ragga, kuduro, dancehall, kizomba, and Baltimore club, to name just a few. “KAKARAK 1” and “KAKARAK 2” sound as if placing an ear to the actual inner workings, as opposed to the sonic output, with an underlying hum, mechanical noise, and intermittent cuts in its current. The emphatic “Ritmo Thoth” is compact, but equally spacious and reverberant, with a pitched-up vocal chant — again, Nada’s tools are audible and infectious. Closing track “Tarraxinha da Calopsita” is the ballad of the EP, a simple, light, sentimental track, with the romantic character of tarraxinha.
While hailing from the Lisbon suburban area, Normal Nada’s mode of thought also corresponds to a decentralization or deterritorialization of the self. The EP’s Bandcamp page gives further, mystic indication: a text in Portuguese about not having a name, being of human nationality, and that the album was made in passage of the phase of brain transmutation. Príncipe describe Normal Nada as “a special kind of cosmogonical pirate” — for me, it’s more in the geological sense of a “pirate stream,” diverting into its own flow the multiform headwaters of alternative currents.
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