Buraka Som Sistema - ClashMusic.com Q&A

Music moves fast, too fast often for critics to keep pace. Sub-genres and spin-offs come and go in heartbeats, and nowhere do shapes and forms shift faster than in the world’s most trend-setting clubs. Ask your average man on the street what kuduro is and they’ll shoot you a funny look and assume you’re trying to ask for directions in a peculiar dialect.

Wikipedia offers some help: kuduro, or kuduru, is a musical style born in Angola, and subsequently adopted by beat-crafters in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. Hugely up-tempo, the music is designed for dancing to first and thinking about second; its rhythms come in flurries, its nuances undulating beneath a surface sheen of purest exuberance.

Among its Portuguese admirers are Buraka Som Sistema, a core trio of Lil’John, Condutor and Riot; their debut album, ‘Black Diamond’, is one of the dance world’s releases of the year – stream it exclusively on ClashMusic.com HERE. A colourful kaleidoscope of a modern dance album, its ebbs and floes are tied tightly to a source foreign to its makers, namely kuduro.

Yet it’s the African sound that’s given the trio their latest breakthrough – ‘Sound Of Kuduro’ features, among other guests, a certain M.I.A.. It’s one of the year’s standout ‘bangers’, so to speak. The track’s provided the band with the platform from which to launch ‘Black Diamond’, out this week via Fabric’s record-releasing wing.

With Buraka Som Sistema not only featured on ClashMusic.com through our exclusive album stream, but also just confirmed for our amazing Clash Revue event at London’s Proud Galleries on December 3 – click HERE to get tickets, and HERE for further details of the show, which also features David Holmes and Simian Mobile Disco – the time seems right to get Lil’John, known to his friends as Joao, on the phone for a quick chin-wagging session.

Firstly, how would you describe kuduro to someone who’s never heard of it?
I think that’s two questions in one, really – how I’d describe our music to someone who’s never heard it, and what we think we do with kuduro. We’re not saying, “We are kuduro”; but we are taking elements of West African music and combining it with what we’ve got. The music is fast and lively; it has things in common with house music. It’s a lot of fun.

‘Black Diamond’ collects together your recent material with older tracks, like ‘YAH!’ from 2006 – fair to say it’s a summary of your work to date, more a compilation of assorted tracks than a coherent album ‘proper’…?
It is a collection of what we’ve done to date, but it’s also slightly different depending on where you get it. In the UK, the first eight tracks are as they are in Portugal – they’re sequenced in a very particular way. I think our next album will be more of a cohesive piece, but it was important to do this album in this way, to let people know who we are and let people who don’t catch up with what we are doing.

There are a lot of collaborations on the album, from known acts like Kano and M.I.A. to names unknown. How did these come about?
The collaborations have happened very naturally, like when we’ve been in the same place as other people, and we’ve got talking. Deize Tigrona, for example – we met her at a festival, where she played before us. We hung out for a few days and did more shows together, and the relationship developed from there. We have had people approach us about collaborations – we are excited about some possibilities in 2009.

So you’re already thinking about album two?
We are thinking about the next album, yes, but we do not really need time ‘off’ to write – we do a lot of our work on laptops, so we can write while on tour. At the moment, we’re full of ideas – because the album has just come out, we’re thinking about all the things we didn’t get a chance to do on it. Sometimes songs can come about when we least expect it. Once, we were stuck at services between Birmingham and Manchester, sat in a café, and that’s where a track began – that’s where its backbone was born.

I know you do perform as a live band sometimes, but did the Buraka Som Sistema act come from DJ roots?
The Buraka stuff did start out as a DJ thing, when we had a club night. The night had to close down, but we wanted to continue with things, and we had to decide where we wanted to go. It comes more from DJing than any traditional sources, but when it comes to live shows we are working really hard on coming up with a show that stimulates emotions in the audience. I remember having an experience when I saw my first Prodigy show – you can love it or hate it, but they put on a show.

2008’s been a great year for you – is there anything that really stands out?
There’s lots that stands out – it’s definitely been a crazy ride. I think it has all built to a head, for the album. I have a problem with people releasing music when there’s no demand for it – they could have an amazing idea, but if there’s no demand for it, I wonder why it’s out. It’s happening more and more – there are so many records that just sit on the shelves, because they’re just more of the same. That’s kind of depressing. So I think we are offering something different, and if someone has followed us since the release of ‘YAH!’, then this album is something big to them. But, obviously, I would not have released this record before because we were doing lots of shows and getting people into the group.

As ‘Sound Of Kuduro’ began to blow up, were you under any pressure to get the album out quickly?
If anything it was the other way around – we wanted the album to be released across territories with as small a time difference as possible. So basically we put a little pressure on everyone to get things ready. It was crazy for a while, but I think it’s worked out.

I think so too – this time of year isn’t typically a great one for good albums, so there’s something of a window of opportunity for you.
Everyone is afraid of Christmas, but we’re not a pop release – Christmas albums are not going to affect our sales. And magazines like Clash are not going to write about the best-ever Christmas albums, so releasing the record now gives us a chance to get coverage in magazines that can focus on music like ours. That’s what’s cool about doing this sort of music.

And what about next year? What plans do you have in place?
We’re going to do loads of shows next year – and we’re hoping to do more proper live shows, where we’re able to bring all the crew down. We want the shows to be as big as we want them to be. At the moment it’s complicated because we’re just starting out in some places, so it’s hard to move eight musicians with all their stuff. So we’re doing DJ/MC shows for a while. But that’s still a show where we try to create a relationship with the audience – we have parts of the show that are more performance-based, like a part with drum pads – and we keep things as lively as possible. We always play most of our own music, or remixes that were done for us – we try to do things in a way that the people watching us would not be able to see anywhere else in the world.

And what about the album – any more singles from it?
We’re going to try to do a mixtape thing. We want to look at the songs on ‘Black Diamond’, and do a more destructive version of it – ‘Blood Diamond’. We couldn’t sample the movie for the album, because it would be too expensive, but maybe for the next album we’ll sample all of it. Perhaps we’ll have to release it online.

‘Black Diamond’ is out now on Fabric and can be heard EXCLUSIVELY on ClashMusic.com by clicking HERE. Get tickets to the Clash Revue show, featuring Buraka Som Sistema, Simian Mobile Disco, David Holmes and more, HERE. Their UK and Ireland DJ/MC dates look a lot like this…

November
28 Bristol Thekla

December
3 London Clash Revue @ Proud Galleries (get tickets)
5 Nortingham Stealth
6 Manchester Roundhouse
9 Sheffield Tuesday Club
10 Oxford Cellar
11 Dublin Twisted Pepper
12 Birmingham Naked Lunch