Sonhos & Pesadelos

There is an impossible wealth of weird and wonky music from Portugal’s Afro-diasporic dance scene – built on the Angolan electronic dance sounds of kuduro and batida, blended with experimental house and techno, and tweaked and warped out of shape – but in a highly contested field this album is definitely one of the greatest examples. It uses the limitations of production technology as creative tools in their own right, making glitch and distortion part of the groove, feeling like it’s all part of some strange ritual – yet it is somehow proper party music at the same, time, not that far from bumping US house producers like Kyle Hall even as its rhythms feel ancient and alien.