The genre of baile funk or funk carioca continues to evolve as it shifts between social media platforms and the street parties of its native Brazil, sometimes blending as though seamlessly with reggaeton, kuduros, gqom or amapiano to form border-hopping hybrids while local artists compelled by a daily practice continue to find ways to make their music both innovative and discrete.
Drawing from samba soul, Miami bass and Latin freestyle, the chanted vocals and hybrid rhythms of Afrobeat, the first boasts of gangster rap and seminal tracks like ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Nunk’ which created the short-lived template for boogified electro, in the nineties the sustained kicks and booming bass of the 808 drum machine which had previously defined the sound were offset by the sensual grooves of tamborzão. In the early 2010s as funk carioca became a global trend, back in São Paulo the aspirational sub-genre of funk ostentação gave way to funk mandelão, a more sinister and nocturnal form steeped in horror tropes and dizzying repetitions, booming synths and minimalist beats. That in turn paved the way for bruxaria, a term which translates to ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ and is harsher still, full of eerie tones and rippling distortions, whose hallucinatory rituals where exemplified last year by DJ K and the shrill sirens of his high-pitched tuin, as the record PANICO NO SUBMUNDO marked his debut for the Kampala outsider bastion Nyege Nyege Tapes.
DJ Anderson do Paraíso started producing tamborzão beats back in 2012, using his bedroom as a makeshift studio, but his sound underwent a profound transformation a few years later when he began attending the Baile do Serrão, the street party in Aglomerado de Serra which is the largest favela in Belo Horizonte and one of the two or three largest favelas in all of Brazil.
In contrast to the histrionics of bruxaria, his take on Belo Horizonte funk is a phantom, bearing an aspect of skeletal minimalism through mineral electronics and classical wisps, from the slowed-down Boléro-esque strings and loose keys of ‘Se Faz de Santinha’ and the aching violins of ‘Aula de Putaria’ to the spectral soprano backing vocals and smushed triangle of ‘Quarentena Cheio de Odio’ and the timpani used as a snare drum in ‘Blogueira Que Virou Puta’. Using his debut for Nyege Nyege Tapes as an eerie and sinister showcase, on Queridão – which is Portuguese for ‘dearest’ and serves as one of Anderson’s nicknames – the artist blurs at the borders of baile funk through a style which is both baroque and decidedly modern, yanking the drapes behind a slew of local emcees.
