Wagner Ribeiro de Souza wasn’t carrying much in his backpack. A local compilation of techno, house and jungle hits, a couple of news clippings and a VHS tape with footage from the club where he played weekly: small fragments of a music scene that he, under the moniker DJ Patife, and some friends were building in São Paulo, Brazil.
It was 1998. He had travelled to London to talk his way into the office of Movement, one of Britain’s most important drum’n’bass nights, with a single goal: pitching an edition of the party in Brazil. “I played that tape recorded at the club,” Patife remembers. “And when Bryan Gee saw like 2,000 people singing, he said: ‘Let’s go to Brazil right now!’”
From that moment on, drum’n’bass started flowing between the two countries, at just the right time. “By the end of the 90s, drum’n’bass had become a bit boring in the UK,” says Patife – the chaos of jungle, which had emerged in the UK at the start of the decade, was starting to be codified into more rigid, macho drum’n’bass tracks. The ginga, or swing, of the Brazilian style, rooted in bossa nova samples and melodious instrumentation, reinvigorated the whole scene. “We brought together two spectacular things: Brazilian music and electronic music,” Patife says. “Everyone drank from the Brazilian source!” In turn, the UK also “opened up the doors to UK electronic music for the Latin world, spanning from speed garage to two-step and grime.”
That cultural crossroads – where Brazilian sounds met breakbeats and UK bass – is now more vibrant than ever thanks to a new generation of artists on both sides of the Atlantic such as British producer and DJ Sherelle. “There’s a natural connection between Brazil and the UK: our music tastes are both so vast,” she says. “And if you’ve come from a working-class or even underclass background in the UK, music is really your only outlook to escape from certain things and express yourself, and I noticed that [is the same] here for a lot of the artists.”
Patife put down roots in London, living there from 2000 to 2017 before moving to rural Portugal where he is now a bus driver – he dreamed of being one even before becoming a DJ – but he remains hugely celebrated in both Brazil and the UK. This weekend he performs at Boa Nova, a new festival dedicated to Brazilian music taking place at Leyton Jubilee Park, London, and one of the closing acts of the British Council’s UK/Brazil Season of Culture. “I noticed an uptick in my bookings in the past two years,” he says, and is looking forward to returning to the city he spent so many years in.
Back in the mid 1990s, he and fellow Brazilian drum’n’bass all-timer DJ Marky were among the next big things in São Paulo’s electronic music scene. “Marky worked in a record shop,” says Patife, who had grown fond of UK club music with his friend through the pages of record catalogues and electronic music magazines such as Mixmag and DJ Mag. Marky played him The Dark Stranger, a 1993 track by British duo Boogie Times Tribe: “My God, what is that? My life changed from that moment on.”
Patife and Marky had a background in hip-hop and Black Brazilian music, and a knack for finding the grittiest, breakneck sounds in electronic music, in opposition to the antiseptic pop and dance that dominated top-tier clubs in São Paulo. Growing from their reputation and gigs, both were in their 20s when they finally managed to save enough money to travel to London for the first time. Three layovers ending in Brussels, plus a train ride, and they were finally standing on UK soil. “In our first two hours in London we ran into Goldie walking through Soho,” Patife says.
From the late 90s to the early 2000s, Patife, Marky and their peers – Andy, XRS, Drumagick, Mad Zoo, among others – built a drum’n’bass cult in São Paulo’s underground, in clubs such as Sound Factory and Arena. But it gradually hit the mainstream: in October 2000, they performed at a free open-air stage in the city centre, which was aired on national television and is still celebrated today as a defining moment for Brazilian electronic music.
As drum’n’bass grew, DJs went from spinning UK tracks to making their own, such as Sambassim by Patife, XRS and Fernanda Porto – a modern bossa nova remix that became the first Brazilian drum’n’bass track ever played on BBC radio, in 2000. Then, in 2002, DJ Marky’s track LK – a collaboration with XRS and British rapper Stamina MC, powered by a sparkling acoustic guitar riff – made the UK Top 20, and the trio became one of the only drum’n’bass acts to appear on Top of the Pops.
After Patife had collared him in the Movement office, Bryan Gee fell in love with the Brazilians’ tropical, samba-laced sound and put out 2001’s The Brasil EP on his label V Recordings: the first Brazilian drum’n’bass release on a UK imprint. Gee compares Brazil’s twist on junglism to the lush, exploratory sound of another subgenre, liquid drum’n’bass: “Both are soulful. Brazilian music has a lot of samba, breaks, so it was easy to be accepted in the UK because people were on the liquid vibe that Fabio and Calibre were pushing.”
Gee has performed dozens of times in Brazil since he first met Patife, and so have other British drum’n’bass staples such as Roni Size, Adam F and Goldie. He admires a new generation of young Brazilian artists including Spy, L-Side and Level 2: “They don’t have samba in their music, but there’s a Brazilian vibe in it. And they love and respect the history.”
As well as Brazilian rap artists such as Ajulliacosta hopping on drum’n’bass beats, Brazilian drum’n’bass is a touchstone for a new wave of UK names, such as Nia Archives – two of her most successful releases, Baianá and Maia Maia, sample Brazilian music – and Sherelle, who performed in São Paulo for the first time in April at the Gop Tun festival.
“I’ve been waiting since the start of my career to play here,” Sherelle says, wearing a football jersey for the São Paulo-based Corinthians team, when I meet her at the festival.
Born in 1993, Sherelle was just a kid when the first drum’n’bass dialogues between the UK and Brazil took place. But in the mid-2000s, gaming became a new gateway to the likes of Drumagick and Patife – some of their tracks were featured in the Fifa Street franchise. “The curation around this soundtrack was amazing,” Sherelle says. “It actually shows a very specific time of how amazing Brazilian drum’n’bass was and still is.”
During her trip Sherelle also played in Rio at the Speedtest rave, founded in 2022 by DJ and producer Chediak and cultural agitator Diogo Queiroz. The party and label orbits the fast-paced and breakbeat electronic music coming out of the UK and Brazil: a frantic amalgam of baile funk, post-dubstep and myriad breaks from jungle and drum’n’bass.
“We’re infusing baile funk sounds into UK club music, and this brings a new layer to the sound, with artists and voices that come from underprivileged neighbourhoods and favelas,” says Chediak. He says that with an increasing number of MCs from Brazil’s ever-popular baile funk scene getting interested in drum’n’bass rhythms, “that raises the odds of making a song that can break through”.
Chediak believes there’s something in UK electronic music that keeps inspiring artists in Brazil. “They have a thing that’s not as groovy as what we do here, but it feels less square than European and especially US electronic music,” he says. “And that comes together with our identity in music-making, something that goes beyond genres. It’s more like a sound, a timbre; it’s less obvious, it sounds fresh.”
Patife toured Brazil with the Speedtest crew at the end of 2025. Hailed by the youngsters as a drum’n’bass oracle, he brought his trademark mix of joy and deep repertoire. “I was completely amazed by what I saw with these kids,” he says. “I thought bass music would be where we left it, in the 2000s underground, but now I see a continuity to it – and there’s a long road ahead. In 20, 30 years from now, these kids will be the gurus of newer generations.”
• Boa Nova festival is at Leyton Jubilee Park, London, 22 May
