At Rio Loco Festival 2023 DJ Danifox Go Crazy

The Portuguese DJ, from the Principe label, will attend the Toulouse Festival of Current and World Music on Wednesday 14 June to present his stellar debut album.

We call it “batida” – literally beats, The sound of a slamming door, a tense heartbeat due to the police raid. The word was chosen in the early 2010s by a handful of Afro-Portuguese artists, musicians, DJs, graphic designers and activists. NB For their creatively frenetic music, which happens to set music released exclusively on the Príncipe label, Lisbon’s most realistically sound, far from the fado cellars and concession shops of Rua Augusta. Electronic, hybrid, cosmopolitan – if the word still asserts its political and radical nature – the batida, the cybernetic taming of the rituals of former Portuguese colonies, Cape Verde’s Funana, Taraxo, Kizumba and Angolan kodoro, is carried on by a furious desire for cultural autonomy – not by chance if Releasing their first EP on the label in 2011, signed by Marlon Silva known as DJ Marfox, Eu Sei Quem Sou (“I know who I am”).

The independent, Daniel Vega, the son of Angolan parents who has been considering a career as a footballer for some time, is even one of his friends in the rankings. We could, easily, take our hat off to his years in Leeds, northern England, but the music he produces under the name Danifox, even if he builds it around the same beats and rhythm as Nídia, Lycos and other RS productions, is of a different essence, melancholic and offbeat. This is particularly the case on Unseed (Anxiety), his stellar debut album, whose heavy, slow rhythms border on Atlanta trap (Njaba), Beauty House (rite) Even the new urban jazz that’s heating up London clubs (awesome a respectful personlike Houston’s “chopped and pulled” sauce).

In the oven and mic Danifox sings, raps, chants, embodies his music and the roots that wiggle and spin there: afro-descendant music to the end of the atoms, without clichés, hyper-creative but always clear. His DJ in Rio Loco is a must at the Toulouse Festival, and is particularly associated with the new electronic currents this year, because in addition to Narciso, the French half of RS Produções and another representative of Principe, we can see the Brazilian king Kami, a Brazilian breja-funk singer or Asna from Côte d’Ivoire Or the talented Tanzanian Travilla, early twenties and fiery inventor of the Dar es Salaam electronic scene.