Nuno Beats - Sai do Coração (Príncipe) [Beats / World Music]

The Slow Music Movement
Jun 25, 2024
2 min read

The cover for Nuno Beats', Sai do Coração album, showing an abstract black line drawing of a face with heart-shaped eyes, tears, and sharp features. Minimalist design on a white background.

A Few Brief Thoughts

After collaborating with his Sintra crew & contributing a few compilation tracks, Nuno Beats steps up to the Príncipe plate with aplomb for his debut long player. A minor dabble with late night gnarliness aside, he largely eschews the dancefloor deviance of his label peers, opting to take a lolloping, downtempo stroll through the speakers, fusing hints of Afropop with Balearic urbanism & percussive riddims with sandy smoochers to give the downtempo continuum a sultry Afrofuturistic nudge.

What The Release Notes Say

Going solo while still keeping intact his devotion to RS Produções, Nuno appears as a true heartbreaker. Silky, space soul, why not even risk the patented future r&b? But this music exists and manifests itself apart from the established production centres, the golden arches of hype edifices and synthetic promotion regurgitated by a thousand cloned fingers. "Sai Do Coração" is a very brave, romantic improbability, shying away from DJ bravado and dancefloor top speed. Through these grooves comes a pure distillation of love, an alchemical sublimatio resulting in the much sought-after "higher substance", a bright globe issuing rays of affection all around.

With love we most likely also buy into a degree of suffering, and though this is not at all the ID of the album, Nuno explicitly connects the two sentiments in "N'Dengue", a cathartic cold cut one grows to cherish intensely by the time it is over. It's a key moment, grief pours out, liberation achieved in the dance - "I will love, I will suffer, I will shout, I will dance". Flip to the other side for "Confusão No Ghetto", another gritty expression, a richly percussive, slow tempo observation of things gone wrong. All the rest in the album feels simple, direct and yet sophisticated like photosynthesis. Like the soil, through which geological becomes biological. Nuno whips up a variety of textures and flavours into the invisible form of Music, romantic fiction into action.