Difficult to believe on the minimal, buzzing evidence of ‘Praying Mantis’ alone, but Rui Da Silva is the Portuguese producer and DJ, whose single ‘Touch Me’ (featuring the vocals of Cassandra Fox) topped the UK Chart in 2001. But that’s not all; Rui has also achieved a certain amount of notoriety as a remixer of Jennifer Lopez’s ‘Play’, the Lighthouse Family’s ‘Happy’ and Yoko Ono’s ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. So how does one leap from the environs of mainstream dance and Portuguese house to a maze of electronic impulses and things escaping one’s mind? Well one starts by founding Kismet Records, where one nurtures a more progressive sound and begins dabbling in tribal house before cooking up something even more exotic with 64 Records.
Boasting the kind of evenly tempered electronic fare favoured by the likes of Kieran Hebden of Four Tet, Luke Vibert and Plaid, ‘Praying Mantis’ finds Da Silva in experimental form exercising reflexes and exploring alien territories beyond the usual remits presented by dance, and made all the more obvious by the odd song titles alone: ‘The Whole Room Dematerialized’, ‘The Depths of Ketlar’, ‘The Contracting Perception of Consciousness’, ‘The Swirling Green Vortex’. It’s not a love album, certainly, and you’d be hard pressed to find any crowd pleasers amongst them.
Brought about by images of minimalist underground clubbers (‘insects’), the album listens like a swarm of chirping cicadas caught up in the hard-drive of your laptop as you slip in a formatted disc and start ripping some of your favourite psyprog tunes. Not that it’s all just crackling static and protracted vortex hangovers. Tracks like ‘Object Dissociation’ and ‘Coming Back Into Focus’ enjoy the grammar of a latin beat, whilst ‘Keeping My Pieces Together’ stabs and grooves with a deliberate eclectro vibe.
To this day he is the only Portuguese musician to score a UK #1. Why try harder?