Xexa’s vocals are sometimes described as airy or ethereal, but as she follows up the acclaimed VibraƧƵes de Prata with her second album Kissom the native Lisbonite and Guildhall graduate soon sounds warped and comic or even faintly maniacal, crossing the narrow bounds of gender and genre, her straining glottis suggesting a widened mouth and constricted lower jaw.
She offers a fulsome embrace of kizomba and even more syrupy and sensual tarraxinha – dance and musical genres which originated in Angola before being taken up by the diaspora and their fellow clubbers in Lisbon around the onset of the 2010s – on ‘Kizomba 003’ and its stretched-out coda, ‘Kissom’ which also serves as the album’s title piece.
‘Pulse Bounce’ veers more towards dub techno through its sleek synths and rebounding, sometimes scattershot percussion while ‘Transversive Line’ subsumes classical intimacies – like clinging piano keys and seafaring, seasick or homesick horns – beneath sawing synths before the whole gets submerged, as Xexa traces a line or finds common ground between the Lisbon icon PrĆncipe, which remains at the cutting edge of contemporary dance music even as its roster diverges away from the batida and kuduro on which it made its name, and the Parisian electroacoustic stalwart INA grm, with ‘Transversive Line’ reminding me say of the limpid and fractured Shifted in Dreams by the institute’s director Kassel Jaeger.
Yet on ‘SerĆ”’ the artist returns to stickier beats and a kind of slippery, rubbery sub-bass rhythm while toying with nineties forms from trip hop to glitch. ‘OĆ”sis’ swarms, conjuring flamenco music through the frayed course of its synthetic strings on a track which calls to mind the experimental outcrops of RosalĆa. And the penultimate short ‘Xtini’ lays out a tundra populated by blackened birds, the kind of environment and atmosphere roused in varying ways by the Tunisian dub practitioner Azu Tiwaline and the Kazakh-British composer and violinist Galya Bisengalieva.
‘Quem Ć©s tu’ – which is Portuguese for ‘who are you’ and proves the long closer to Kissom – proceeds warily through a spectre of dissolving vocals, wisps of synthesizer and smothered kicks. An outro in the fullest sense of the term in so far as it enacts both a going out and taking leave, the track and Xexa’s incantatory voice is suffused by vaporous mists and synthesized bird calls before one-third of the way through we suddenly change gear.
Now this probing ‘Quem Ć©s tu’ cedes to more driving rhythms, gliding into the pitch darkness of night trammelled only by the odd disruly alarm or revving of a fellow car engine, splintering and cohering as Xena begins to bleed together a profusion of textures and gestures and forms from gamelan percussion to Middle Eastern rhythms played on the oud and zither to the neon-clad beatmaking of AraabMuzik or from neo soul even to a smidge or slither of big band, a dissolution of taste and borders which she has already reckoned with by virtue of her record title Kissom, which apparently stems from one of her most commonly heard questions, ‘Ki som Ć© este?’ which means ‘What is this music?’.
