Kuduro Meets Tecno-Brega | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:15:15 Kuduro Meets Tecno-Brega by Frederick Moehn The «Lusotronic» festival in May 2013 brought Portuguese electronic music to Berlin's multicultural neighborhood Kreuzberg. The summit meeting was accompanied by films and lectures. For Norient it's an occasion for a deep ethnomusicological insight in the lusotronic postcolonial cultural spaces. Kreuzberg It was my first time visiting the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin since I spent about half a year there shortly after the Wall was torn down and reunification began. «You won’t believe how much it’s changed,» a friend who has lived in this part of Berlin all of her working life said to me on the phone before I flew in from London. In fact, the neighborhood did not seem https://norient.com/stories/kuduro-meets-tecno-brega Page 1 of 14 Kuduro Meets Tecno-Brega | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:15:15 so markedly different to me. Sure, longtime residents lament the rise in real estate prices in recent years as gentrification creeps across the city; packs of foreign students and tourists crowd the neighborhood’s streets and cafes; and there are many more bars than before. But Kreuzberg still has a strong Turkish presence, and it remains a center for leftist political protest. Graffiti covers nearly every wall space, and even a couple of the caravan camps that were there when West Berlin was an island in the Eastern Bloc remain in place (squatting in empty apartment buildings, however, is no longer legal). Young and old still spend hours playing bocce ball on the weekends in the greens of the Paul-Linke Ufer, along the canal. Perhaps some of the neighborhood’s legendary counterculture is now more posture than passion; but there is still plenty to protest in the Berlin of the Euro era. «There is no quiet hinterland!» proclaimed a bill announcing an anti-fascist demonstration in Buch, just North of Berlin and purportedly a favored neighborhood of right- wingers and neo-Nazis. «Fight racism now!» was the slogan for a protest scheduled to take place two days later at the Reichstag, near the Brandenburg Gate. Other current initiatives in Kreuzberg include protests against refugee deportation and rising rents (see Kotti & Co.), among other things. Recently, the Turkish community appears to have mobilized in solidarity with the protests challenging Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Taksim Square, Istanbul. Karneval der Kulturen https://norient.com/stories/kuduro-meets-tecno-brega Page 2 of 14 Kuduro Meets Tecno-Brega | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:15:15 It was the weekend of the eighteenth annual Karneval der Kulturen—Carnival of Cultures. The main attraction is the Sunday parade through Kreuzberg, but there are also street festivities in the area between the Hallesches Tor overground train station and the Church of the Holy Cross. The area was so crowded with Berliners that it was a challenge to move from one end of it to the other. The festival itself seemed to serve primarily as an occasion to drink, eat, and meet up with friends on the Pentecost holiday. Rather scrappy musical stages were loosely organized around world regions, but few people appeared to be there to hear the scheduled bands; indeed, street performances seemed to draw more enthusiastic audiences. Lusotronics But I wasn't in Berlin for the Carnival. I came to attend the Lusotronics festival at Club Gretchen, also at Hallesches Tor, just adjacent to the street festivities. The nightclub occupies a brick building that, from the mid- nineteenth century, purportedly housed the stables of the 1st Guards Dragoon Regiment «Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland,» which fought in the Imperial German Army in the First World War. «The beautiful vaulted ceiling, the delicate columns, are now sounded with beats and bass,» the club website proclaims. What is Lusotronics? The term combines «Luso,» which essentially means «Portuguese,» with «electronics» to refer to «digital, urban music lifestyles» from the Portuguese-speaking world. The festival, organized by Berlin-based DJ and producer Daniel Haaksman, included musicians from the three largest https://norient.com/stories/kuduro-meets-tecno-brega Page 3 of 14 Kuduro Meets Tecno-Brega | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:15:15 former Portuguese colonies—Angola, Brazil, Mozambique—plus Portugal, with Lisbon viewed as the main hub of circulation (http://lusotronics.com/about). It focused on genres of dance music «born in the shanty towns of megalopolises such as Rio De Janeiro, Luanda, Maputo, Belém or Lisbon,» produced on relatively inexpensive digital instruments, and distributed globally via the Internet. Genres such as «baile funk, kuduro, tecno brega, funana or ku-house,» the festival description asserts, «represent some of the most promising and future-oriented innovations in worldwide pop and dance culture.» One might quibble that Lisbon cannot persuasively be considered a hub of baile funk, or that the term ku-house was invented something like five minutes ago (it hasn’t yet earned a Wikipedia entry … ), or that the prefix «Luso» is too Portugal-centered for some in the countries on the –ized end of colonization. But the list of DJs and other performers lined up for the festival was exciting. Aside from the musical guests, the agenda also featured four lectures, and the screening of documentary films. Its aims were ambitious: to «deal with the main issues, relations and dynamics of colonial history and post-colonialism, regionalism and globalization, sampling and citation, copyright and creation, internet culture, as well as gender and identity constructions in the digital age» (http://lusotronics.com/about). Whew, that’s enough to make an academic break out in a sweat without even hitting the dance floor. The setting for the lectures was a nearly pitch dark room behind the main hall. Projected against the brick wall and behind the speakers were images from the national flags of the countries included in the festival, such as the «Order and Progress» slogan from Brazil, the historic shield emblazoned on the Portuguese standard, or Angola’s cog and machete, symbol of the working classes. Although the darkness was a bit odd, the lectures drew engaged audiences who asked follow-up questions of the speakers. DJ and doctoral research student Stefanie Alisch opened the festival with a keynote address and DJ/producer Benjamin LaBrave spoke after her on Saturday, the first day of the festival. Sunday’s lectures included Andy Cumming’s paper on Tecno brega («From Local Cheese to Global Bass») ahead of the performance of DJ Waldo Squash and Gang do Eletro, and Wolfram Lange on how the «pacification» campaigns that are taking place in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in anticipation of the World Cup and the Olympic Games have shut down many working class funk bailes. Before describing selected performances, I want to devote some space to the discussions from the first day of lectures, since they help frame the festival. https://norient.com/stories/kuduro-meets-tecno-brega Page 4 of 14 Kuduro Meets Tecno-Brega | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:15:15 Lusophone Difference Benjamin LeBrave is founder of the Akwaaba music label based in Ghana, through which he promotes and distributes electronic dance music from the African continent. He drew from his experience as an international producer and disc jockey (as BBrave) to make observations about what he called lusophonication—«how Lusophone culture swallows and digests local and foreign cultural influences.» He suggested that the local appropriation through mixture (and through remixing) of international influences was especially prevalent in Lusophone contexts (for example, how Angolans have remixed dance tracks from abroad «in a local fashion» in the kuduro genre). LeBrave sought to explain the postcolonial difference he perceived in Lusophone settings. «If you go out on the streets and do a blind test; if you play a song from Brazil, and a song from Angola, and a song from Portugal for someone,» he said, that listener «will probably notice some kinds of similarities.» This was not the case, in LeBrave’s experience, for the different musical cultures of the Francophone and Angolophone postcolonial world. He elaborated: If you speak English, the influence of the U.S. [even more than England] is enormous. If you go to Francophone Africa, France has a really big role as well. My experience in Lusophone countries is that it’s a bit more varied. If you go to Angola people are aware of Cape Verdean music, https://norient.com/stories/kuduro-meets-tecno-brega Page 5 of 14 Kuduro Meets Tecno-Brega | norient.com 5 Oct 2021 08:15:15 they’re aware of Portuguese music, they’re aware of Brazilian music. I didn’t notice that in Francophone countries. Congo has a heavy influence. Nigeria has a heavy influence, but I don’t feel like it’s as even a playing field as in Lusophone countries … You can make a kuduro hit and you can play it in Bahia. You can play it in Maputo. It makes sense. You can do a baile funk song, [and] you can play it in Luanda. You can play it in Portugal … So I see this Lusophone world as a network that is a bit more even. Every place has its own identity, but there’s this common ground, a common language, and common cultural references that enable the music to travel a bit more easily. The Lusophone world, LeBrave suggested, is not completely dominated by one country. While it may be almost impossible to test LeBrave’s hypothesis through scholarly research, the idea of a comparatively decentered postcolonial cultural space seems plausible.