When I wrote about fidget house a few weeks ago I spoke of how lots of the producers associated with this blog-friendly genre were using elements of world music to spice up their own, largely dull, offerings. Of course, this was happening long before fidget house and will continue long after the genre dies (in about six months).
So it's nice to see Lisbon's Buraka Som Sistema turning the tables and taking kuduro music, popular in their city, and combining it with western dance music. On their debut album, Black Diamond, you can hear influences from dubstep, hip-hop, electro, grime, techno and even, ironically, fidget house.
Kuduro, which translates as "hard ass", began in Luanda, Angola in the late 80s. Initially, producers sampled traditional carnival music like zouk and soca from the Caribbean and semba from Angola and laid this around a fast 4/4 beat. Soon after its commencement, the genre was imported to the suburbs of Lisbon via African immigrants. The scene in Lisbon is probably now more thriving than in kuduro's birthplace.
One of the genre's best known modern day producers is Luanda's DJ Znobia, who would have featured on MIA's recent album, Kala, but for a motorcycle accident which left him out of action for a while.
MIA's take on kuduro is a little different from the history books. In an interview with Rolling Stone this year she said: "[Kuduro] initially came from kids not having anything to make music on other than cellphones, using samples they'd get from their PCs and mobiles' sound buttons. Now that it's growing, they've got proper PCs to make music on."
Next she'll be telling us that early grime was made on calculators. (In fact, the Texas Instruments TI30XA was far too complex for epochal grime producers Musical Mob to comprehend so instead they had to use Playstations to make beats. Maybe.)
Luckily, MIA's kuduro dream did come true earlier this year when she featured alongside Znobia on Sound of Kuduro Sound of Kuduro, the standout track on Buraka Som Sistema's debut album.
When I interviewed Buraka Som Sistema's Lil John last year he told me that kuduro producers initially set out to make techno and electro but ended up with this new genre instead.
Listening to tracks like YAH! it's clear that the quartet's "progressive kuduro" sound is sometimes so close to techno and other Western genres that it can become almost indistinguishable. In that respect, Buraka Som Sistema has succeeded where their kuduro forefathers failed.
