In the opening moments of Rádio Libertadora that twisted branch of baile funk or funk carioca which is known as bruxaria manifests itself through a warped and menacing music box melody which seems to function like a haunted come-hither. It carries a lulling quality at the same time as it portends the drama to come as the track soon breaks out into a dizzying array of hyper-shrill traffic stop whistles and punishing sub-bass beats.
‘Esta no ar a Rádio Libertadora’ has already by way of a prelude or epigraph introduced one of the record’s core themes as its opening sound, a sonar signal, gives way to a sample from a speech by the Brazilian militant figure Carlos Marighella, who founded the Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group Ação Libertadora Nacional before being killed in late 1969 during an ambush by the police. The speech as delivered by Marighella was originally broadcast during a clandestine takeover of the state-owned Rádio Nacional earlier that year, while its appearance at the outset of this album is soon shrouded by siren alarms and snarling laughter on a track which features the rasping vocals of MC Renatinho Falcão.
More plaintive flute-like whistles and tinny music box melodies briefly emerge from the dense thicket of the mix. The producer is DJ K a couple of years on from a personal landmark in the form of his widely acclaimed solo debut Pânico no Submundo. Now drawing from an old tradition of bloody resistance to military dictatorship and other forms of top-down control, he describes his new collection Rádio Libertadora as ‘an album against the system’ which confronts such issues as urban violence, social inequality and police brutality while embracing by way of a riposte the explicit sexuality of ‘putaria’ a term which encompasses bacchanalian revelry and suggests a certain scuzziness, sleaziness and even an unbridled whorishness set within a libertine spirit of communal defiance.
DJ K is one of the defining figures within the field of bruxaria, a kind of darker and witchier offshoot of funk mandelão which already dealt in horror tropes, booming synthesizers, disorientating repetitions and harsh minimalist beats. Bruxaria goes further still, pushing on through the craggy moonlit trees while emphasising an ultra high-pitched tuin, a shrill whistling siren call which baile funk enthusiasts have tended to associate with lança perfume, a cheap inhalant which causes short-term euphoria and hallucinations alongside an extra sensitivity to music played at high volumes and pitches. Tuin then stretches the limits of consciousness while bruxaria as its stated bid strives to ruin headphones or make one’s eardrums bleed.
‘Mega Suicidio Auditivo’ drills down further into the harshness of the sound as DJ K furnishes his steep productions with appearances from a slew of local emcees. Blazing sirens and crudding beats seem to flood a teeming cityscape. The sounds of gunfire pierce thudding yet buoyant basslines, blazing horns and the crackle of loudspeakers. ‘Psy Vem Fazer Nenem’ combines fairground melodies or the bluster of a day at the races with giddy helical ascents. Still just 24 years old, DJ K is now well versed in the rhythms and atmospheres of São Paulo’s underground scene and while the Arabic chants from Pânico no Submundo reemerge on the crudely-named ‘Sua Filha Quer Os D’ – prior to a feature on what sounds like the springy berimbau or Jew’s harp – and again on ‘Ali Perto da Imigrantes’, other lighter and lilting elements of his former sound, like trilling birdcalls, largely dissipate on what is his heaviest record to date.
More power tools and gunshots split the screen on the aptly-titled ‘Troca Tiro e Faz Dinheiro’ while ‘Sobrevive Contra o Estado’ is less coiled but gutsily bold as it seems to trace or embed celebratory horn fanfares. The raucous ‘Beat Suga Alma’ mucks together everything from youthful cries and overlapping boasts to synthesized mallet percussion, wheezing sirens and drilling rhythms. Sometimes there are echoes of not only grime and drill but Andean dance music like the huayno, caporales or kullawada rhythms amplified by Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton and the auditory distortion products or psychoacoustics of Maryanne Amacher.
Then on ‘A Tropa do DJ K’ as delivered by MC MJ and MC Menor ADR those shrill psychoacoustics vie with more conventional club fare. MC Daneve on ‘Ela Pega o Brinquedo na Mão’ dabbles in more melodic vocals almost in the vein of a folk chant, call and response traditions especially related to Hindustani classical or sub-Saharan African music or calls to prayer, surrounded by now familiar elements like pummelling basslines and piercingly shrill whistles but with the addition of snapping handclap percussion all set within a more clopping rhythmic frame. And if ‘Techno de Favelado’ only appears self-explanatory – as four-on-the-floor gives way to clanking metallics, yapping vocals and a pitched homage to Nino Rota’s classic Godfather love theme – it still serves to provide an ebullient and delirious close to another stunning DJ K set.
