“Freedom is the content. Necessity is the form.”
– Leo Tolstoy
I mean, P. Adrix’s new album just wants you to move, wherever you could be, in whatever sphere of unnameability that haunts you or whatever iteration that recurs in your life, binding it into poetry. However your life fits or chafes against the context of Album Desconhecido’s syntax, however it produces tiny kinks in the flow — like a calcium deposit in a kidney — just move, even if only glancingly. For from there, in that sphere of untouchability, and within that movement, can we, like the name of this album, become, somehow, unknown.
The attraction of these kuduro tracks lies in how they specifically draw attention to how danceable they are, but also how they are rough and jagged and irregular and encoded onto streets and embedded into walls and strewn forth onto cellphones, with no true center for where they exist except the Bandcamp page from which they came and the computer from which they were birthed. Maybe a couple of suburbs of big cities like Lisbon and Luanda could potentially be the cultural center, but they are not, for P. Adrix lives in Manchester. That this album participates in a cultural maelstrom also means that it comes from that same maelstrom — that of the digitally disconnected bodies of producers and dancers and DJs and little kids kicking a soccer ball with this playing on a cellphone and the music enthusiasts in the nightclub listening to this, heads moving, feet moving, eyes in a trance.
It sounds sometimes swampy, or crumply, like a composition notebook dragged onto concrete and forced into a nightclub, or a poster ripped off from its wall and turned into a drum kit. “Viva la Raça” sounds more angelic and lofty than the others, mostly because of its timbre, which sounds tranquil and made of air, or feathers, or whatever material an angel’s wings would be made of — perhaps the hair of God? What binds these tracks is their lack of any true crescendo or climax or conclusion: they just kind of exist, do what they need to do for a couple of minutes, and end, like a spermatozoid that’s lost its way and doesn’t dare ask directions. Any kind of simulation of the Divine or lofty critique of the Establishment will be left for the other music critics to decode. For me, their remote denseness suits us, and the obsolescence of P. Adrix points toward the idea that, in the nightclub, your status means nothing to the music.
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