On their debut album, Black Diamond, Lisbon-based, Luanda-influenced ‘ghetto-funk’ outfit Buraka Som Sistema redraw the familiar map of globalization. The Portuguese quartet —DJ Riot (Rui Pité), Lil' John (João Barbosa), MC Kalaf (Kalaf Ângelo), Conductor (Andro Carvalho)— make club music largely free from American influence, drawing influence from Angolan kuduro, dubstep, grime, Brazilian baile-funk, and the globe-trotting tracks of M.I.A. and Diplo. The viral video for their M.I.A. collaboration, "Sound of Kuduro," has been viewed over a million times, taking kuduro from Portuguese and Angolan clubs unto the world.
Interview: 25 November 2008
What were your musical beginnings?
“When I was around 15 —I’m 30 now, so that was 15 years ago— I bought my first drumkit, and started playing in the first of a bunch of shitty rockbands. That's when me and João started playing together. We were in a band called Blanket, we sang in English. We were all about the Seattle scene; we were very influenced by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney. Then, we started to change our sound, get a little more electronic, and there was some disagreement between band-members, then Blanket just split up.”
Which lead to?
“Well, I’m really a rock guy. So, I started looking for another band. But, at the same time, I was planning a side project with Lil’ John, called Fusion Lab, in which we’d work with electronic elements, new software, do experimental things like record broken glass, industrial machinery. Then we met Kalaf, and started working on more and more stuff. We lived in Amadora, right near each other, and were always doing music, doing projects; we were part of the first-ever drum'n'bass crew in Portugal, all different things. When you’re a young guy, you love having all these projects, and never have just the project. But, finally, we decided we needed to do something serious, to concentrate on what was really working.”
How did you settle on Buraka Som Sistema as the project?
“We were talking about how kuduro wasn’t really well-explored in the Portuguese dance scene, but we knew it worked, and we set out to explore it. We always work like this: if we like something, we’ll incorporate it into our sound. But, we tried to work on a kuduro matrix, and flip our influences into it, do our own version of it. We knew that no one was making good edits of kuduro; this guy in Angola making tracks, he doesn’t know what DJ friendly is. He doesn’t know about 16 bars, the drop, stuff like that; so it was always chaotic to just play regular kuduro in clubs. So we started making some edits, then came our originals.”
Do you feel as if you’ve become kuduro ambassadors to the world?
“I’m gonna be honest: I think that’s a little bit unavoidable, because we’re bringing the rhythm outside of Portugal, outside of Angola. But that’s a very heavy expression: kuduro ambassador. I know what you mean when you say that, but we don’t feel like it. For us, for Portuguese guys, the reality is totally different: kuduro is just another influence for us, we’re just using the rhythms, and if you listen to Black Diamond you can hear loads of other influences. For some guy in Angola, the way he feels about kuduro might be completely different.”
Was Black Diamond years in the making?
“More like year in the making. We worked on it for one year, after spending a few years thinking about making an album. We started off with EPs, to work out where we were going to go with this, because we feel that with an album comes great responsibility. An album is a serious work, it’s not like some four-track dance EP, strictly dancefloor business. If you have the opportunity to record an album, you should tell a story, say something, not just make some collection of tunes.”
What kind of story did you want to tell?
“If you listen to the record, it’s like a trip around the world. It starts in Angola, then goes to Portugal, then goes to Brazil. These countries are all very connected: the Portuguese once took Angolan slaves to Brazil. As well as that, we drew on dubstep from the UK, and went off to Sri Lanka a bit with M.I.A. It’s an album about the world without United States at its centre.”
The title, Black Diamond, suggests there’s an anti-globalization element running through it?
“We chose that expression because it was like totally anti-bling. We feel like our music is a reality, our music is not like that new-century United States music, with cars and girls and money all over it. That was the concept. There's plenty of expressions that go with Black Diamond —for example, it can refer to black guys who’ve had post-apartheid success in South Africa— but, for us, it was a reference to the illegal diamond trade in Angola. And the fact that Angola has a lot of oil, too. There are so many problems in Angola because of these. Oil is like a black diamond: with oil, with diamond, you have money. And with money, you have problems.”
How do you go about addressing such complex political issues in songs to be played in clubs?
“Well it’s still a dance album. You can think radical, feel political, but you can’t dose it up too much; people still have to want to dance to it. But we found some ways to do it: obviously, the interludes are about the diamond trade, but it’s in songs, too. Something like "General," where you have the story of a General’s daughter from Angola who wants to be the next Beyoncé, so she asks her father for money, to come to Portugal and record her R&B album. That’s a very Angolan/Portuguese reality, right there. These General’s daughters, full of cash, they’re just spoilt brats. I think that was the most political intrusion in one song we have; that’s a big critique of Angola as a militarized country.”
“New Africas” seems to be a particularly pointed song.
“That’s Kalaf explaining that Africa is not just about cheetahs and lions. Kuduro was never world music; it wasn’t born on congas and bongos, as some traditional folk-music. It was kids making straight-up dance-music from, like, ’96. Playing this new music, this new African music, that feels straight-up political in itself.”
