At the Rio Loco 2023 festival, DJ Danifox goes crazy – Liberation

2023-06-13 05:51:00

The Portuguese DJ, from the Príncipe label, will be at the Toulouse festival of current and world music on Wednesday June 14 to present his superb first album.

We call it the “batida” – literally beat, the sound of a door slamming, the pounding of a heart stressed by a police raid. Word chosen in the early 2010s by a handful of young Afro-Portuguese artists, musicians, DJs, graphic designers, activists of the night for their creatively overheated music, which happens to designate the music released exclusively on the Príncipe label, the sound of the most realistically contemporary Lisbon, far from the fado cellars and franchise shops of Rua Augusta. Electronic, hybridized, cosmopolitan – if the word can still assert its political and radical nature – the batida, cybernetic taming of the ritmos of the former Portuguese colonies, Cape Verdean funana, tarraxo, kizomba and Angolan kuduro, is carried by a furious desire for cultural independence – not by chance if the very first EP released on the label in 2011, signed Marlon Silva alias DJ Marfox, is entitled I Know Who I Am (“I know who I am”).

Independent, Daniel Veiga, child of Angolan parents who considered a career as a footballer for a time, is even one of his label friends. We can, for ease, take the hat off to his years spent in Leeds, in the north of England, but the music he produces under the name of Danifox, even if he builds it around the same rhythms and percussion tessitura than Nídia, Lycos and other RS ​​Produções, is of a different essence, melancholy and offbeat. This is particularly the case on Anxiety (anxiety), his superb first album, whose heavy and slow rhythms border on Atlanta trap (Why), the esthete’s deep-house (Ritual) even the urban neo acid jazz that heats London clubs (superb Gentlemanlike a “chopped and screwed” salsa in Houston).

At the oven and at the microphone, Danifox sings, raps, chants, embodies his music and the roots that wriggle and pivot there: an Afro-descendant music to the end of the atoms, without cliché, hyper creative but always obvious. His DJ set at Rio Loco is a must at the Toulouse festival, particularly connected to new electronic currents this year, since in addition to Narciso, French half of RS Produções and another representative of Príncipe, we can see the Brazilian King Kami, singer of brega funk. Brazilian, the Ivorian Asna or the Tanzanian virtuoso Travella, early twenties and fiery inventor of the Dar es-Salaam electronic scene.

DJ Danifox, Wednesday June 14 at 8:30 p.m. at the Rio Loco Festival in Toulouse (from June 14 to 18).