Words by Christel Escosa
Photos by Richard Kelly

Buraka Som Sistema are a force to be reckoned with. Fierce, intense and joyfully raw, their sound is truly an international musical phenomenon, getting the usual ‘world beat’ suspects excited; Diplo, Switch and M.I.A. amongst many. Their banging, dancefloor-shaking brand of the Angolan kuduro – via Portugal, infused with European flavours and 21st century electronics – has been kicking up a fuss since they released their 12” Yah! in 2007. Then early this year, the Sound of Kuduro began assaulting ears and eyes on the underground courtesy of cameos by DJ Znobia, Saborosa, Puto Prata and the ubiquitous bamboo banga herself, M.I.A.

Buraka Som Sistema’s melting pot of influences all boil up into some wickedly ‘hard ass’ (as kuduro translates to) beats accompanied by some super heavy weight bass lines and lyrics spit with a joy that is aggressive, unrestrained and pure; the kind of which is rarely, if ever, found in so called non ‘world’, anglo-centric music.
I sat down and had a chat with Joao (DJ Lil John), Andro (Conductor) and Kalaf about their upcoming release Black Diamond, picked up some slanguage in both English and Portuguese and came to the conclusion that language barriers or no, it just isn’t possible to misunderstand or to lose the energy, nerve and verve of Buraka Som Sistema even in translation.

JOAO: My name is Joao, and I make music. I’m one of the guys who does the instrumental part of Buraka and live, I press a lot of buttons and try and make it happen.

ANDRO: My name is Andro – Conductor, in the group, and I’m also a producer and I sing around the band.

KALAF: My name is Kalaf. I MC and hype the party.
JOAO: He’s like, what was the name of that guy from Happy Mondays? He played the tambourine or something like that…

And where are you all from? Who’s from Portugal and who’s from Angola?

JOAO: I’m from Lisbon [Portugal], born and raised, and I don’t have any kind of different blood running in me.
ANDRO: DJ Riot is the only guy who’s not here and he’s from Lisbon, but he has a little bit of Mozambique blood and Indian something. And I was born in Cuba, but I grew up in Angola and now I live in Lisbon.
KALAF: I was born in Angola and now I live in Lisbon.

So how did you all find each other?

JOAO: We put an ad in the paper.

Like lonely hearts!

JOAO: Please contact me!
ANDRO: Music brought us together. Some collaborations, some productions here and there and we hooked up together.

How long have you been together?

JOAO: The whole thing started in 2006. Just started out with some club nights in Lisbon, but we hadn’t had a chance to release anything, and this was in Portugal at least, until summer 2006. First time we deejayed at the Old Blue Last, we had zero releases back then. And then we did Fabric in May 2007, our first official gig. And that was exactly the same time that the Yah! single came out, cause I remember Phil taking the 12 inches over to Fabric.

Did you intend to go international from the start?

KALAF: We got feedback from outside, through our myspace page and people really started liking it. The tracks have a feel; and DJs were asking to play them.
JOAO: We didn’t discuss that, but since the very early stage of the process, there has been interest from DJs and people all over the world, which is what made us become more aware of all this.

In Portugal, when you’re at home, who listens to your music? What kind of people?

JOAO: Kids.

What do you mean by kids?

KALAF: 14 to 25 year olds. That’s the core of our audience.
JOAO: Cause we’re all forty that’s why we call them kids [laughs]
KALAF: And in that group are people all from different social backgrounds.
ANDRO: We got the guys that listen to us, and then the ones who follow what we do. And we got the ringtone fans. We got ringtone fans, album fans and live show fans.

If you take your music out of it’s context and put it here in London there’s gonna be a certain kind of person –

KALAF: We haven’t figured out yet what kind of person in London, what the crowd is. Every time we have a different crowd.
JOAO: We’ve had like two shows that have been officially our shows, not just some festival or big club night with lots of people on the line-up and I dunno, were there many black people at Cargo?
KALAF: There were more at Fabric.

That’s because you can smoke weed at Fabric.

[laughs all around]

But it depends on what night. The last time I went was for Lee Scratch Perry.

ANDRO: Come ooooon! HAHAHAHA PICK ANOTHER DAY!

So because so much of your lyrics are in Portuguese, do you think –

JOAO: That’s strange isn’t it…?

Well, for one, it’s harder for your English speaking audience to sing along, except for the ‘wegue, wegue wegue’ and the ‘yah!’ and that’s cool, but do you feel like you want to explain yourselves? The album is called Black Diamond and that’s such a statement but, a lot of people listening might not speak Portuguese, so might miss the message.

KALAF: Well, yesterday we were in a show with a lot of MCs, some from England, from Senegal, wherever; and I asked myself, if we really understand what the MCs are saying, even in English, you know? Really. And most of the time, we don’t.
JOAO: I mean, it’s only after you’ve actually heard the song with headphones or in your house like –
KALAF: Or when you google the lyrics!
JOAO: Like when you actually listen to the lyrics you end up understanding some things, but I mean, the first time I heard Black on Both Sides by Mos Def, I didn’t understand a word that he was talking about.
ANDRO: I’m a very hip hop guy, and I took like, five or ten years listening to hip hop before I really understand something, like really something that they were saying, like actually the words.
KALAF: There’s a lot of slang –
JOAO: And also the social context, like for example, you don’t know how someone might call a policeman, I mean, you know a policeman’s called a policeman, but you don’t know the slang words for it.
KALAF: A lot of the time I still don’t understand shit about what they’re saying!
ANDRO: So to me, for the singing in Portuguese; its almost the same thing. Just the sounds and rhymes, the words, the way of saying things, the right tempo –

As long as people get the feel…

ANDRO: As long as it gets you to the wegue, beautiful.

JOAO: And there’s another element to that. The way that rhymes are said in most of our songs, in terms of how loud the voice is and all that kind of stuff, we try to approach the voice as sometimes another percussive instrument as well, more than actually just properly sung on top of the song. We try and invert the importance or role of things a little bit. Specially because we know that happens, you know, not understanding what people are saying like, even if it’s in Portuguese. And the fact is, when you google the lyrics, you’ll get a 90% chance of the lyrics not being correct.

And then there’s google translate –

ANDRO: And that’s even worse! Especially with the way Angolan people speak Portuguese…
KALAF: But let me tell you, they’re not stupid lyrics, they’re saying something.

So what are you trying to say in Black Diamond then, in a nutshell?

KALAF: A lot of things!
ANDRO: Basically the whole idea of the Black album – ahh Black Diamond sorry, there’s been so many Black albums that have come out! – is that you know…have you ever seen a black stone? That could be a rough diamond. You have a lot of black stones, and there could be diamonds in there. Well you know the stones that you pick up from the bottom of rivers? The water has been passing over them so that they’re smooth…but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to be beautiful -
JOAO: Because the diamond can actually be inside. It’s just the basic idea of having a rough thing; you can work on something and make it something beautiful, or you can leave it as it is, and that’s beautiful too.
KALAF: It’s kinda like, what DJ Riot says, ‘There’s no ugly women, there’s just women with less money.”
JOAO: So that’s the album. [laughs all around]

Can you explain to our non Portuguese speaking readers, one Portuguese word each, that’s relevant to the album so that if they hear it, they can relate.

JOAO: Okay, so I’m going to explain something, not just a word. There’s a song on the album called IC 19; it’s actually a road. We did that song cause a lot of people, well, do you know about tuning here? Like when people race…[illegal car racing]
KALAF: It’s kinda like pimp my ride –
JOAO: No, pimp my ride is kinda like ‘make my car look beautiful’. Tuning is like, make my car go 300km per hour and make a lot of noise. And that road, during the day time, is the busiest road in the whole country because basically it’s the one single road that goes into all of the Lisbon suburbs, so everyone who goes to work during the day takes that road and it’s a reality for us everyday. I’m at the start of that road, so I don’t really know about the traffic area so much, but at night, the road is full of tuning guys and pimp my ride guys, and the fast and the furious guys. So we named the song that, cause if I was driving my car while listening to that song, it would make me want to step on the gas. It’s that cheesy kind of idea, but it’s adrenaline, y’know?
KALAF: Ok, this is an Angolan slang, tiroza – wait, is this on the album?
JOAO: Oh my god. Yes, it is.
KALAF: I don’t have the album with me!
JOAO: He has to get out the track list…
KALAF: Well, we have different releases in different countries, it’s the funny thing about this Black Diamond thing, because I think there are a lot of goodies for every region or every part of the globe. So the American release will be slightly different from the Portuguese and the European one. So.
JOAO: So. What about the sentence. Tiroza.
KALAF: So. Tiroza means like, let’s go, let’s bounce.
JOAO: Bounce? Leave.

We’re down with bounce, that’s right.

JOAO: Bounce is like, to dance right?

Well, it can be… That’s why you’re the white guy here!

JOAO: I just know about cars!
KALAF: It’s American slang. I got it from hip hop! So, tiroza is a new word. If people want to have a new slang that they can use in daily life, then tiroza.
ANDRO: You stole my phrase! I was gonna use that one!
KALAF: Well you passed to me –
ANDO: Shut up! I gotta think about something to say now! [laughs] You wanna help me?
KALAF: Wegue?
ANDRO: Wegue was kind of – [breaks into an old song by Mori Cante called Yeke Yeke]
JOAO No, there was a house remix.
[All break up into fits of laughter]

ANDRO: That song is like, a very old song and a very African song and he was like “There’s a house remix!”
JOAO: The hit was the house remix!
ANDRO: The hit was the original one! You go to youtube and you say Mori Cante, and Yeke Yeke -
JOAO: You go to youtube and put Yeke Yeke and you get the house remix. That’s the video.
ANDRO: Ok ok, wegue, is actually a kid’s game play.
JOAO: Like handclapping and stuff.
ANDRO: So…wegue…doesn’t actually mean…anything!
[laughs]

BURAKA SOM SISTEMA’s BLACK DIAMOND is out on FABRIC RECORDS NOVEMBER 10, 2008. So go ahead, drop that shit into your players and smoke it. Holler.

For the record, I youtubed Mori Cante’s Yeke Yeke and I DID get a remix come up first!