EVERY GENRE PROJECT - October 28 - Beat bruxaria

Genre of the Day - Beat bruxaria 🇧🇷

Album of the Day - ESPANTA GRINGO by d.silvestre (2023)

The other night at a vampiric-themed birthday party, I was tasked with making the playlist. I was suddenly confronted with the range of choices for a Halloween-season playlist: I felt the kitschy classics like “Monster Mash” didn’t quite fit the mood. You can go for a goth-rock darkness, or for witchier blues. I suppose the best playlist would be a balance of all those strains of the spooky season. Luckily for me, I never had to face the issue head on because the speaker was broken and somebody else later brought one they manned themselves. I unfortunately was not privy to the fact that the Pixies, who I’d seen over the summer with the friend I was throwing the party with, had just released a Halloween-themed album the previous day. Even more shockingly, I didn’t consult RYM which has a whole Halloween genre. I suppose I know what I’ll be covering on the 31st. As for the playlist, we’ll get ‘em next year. 

If there was any other genre that could’ve been appropriate, though, it would’ve been today’s freaked out version of Brazilian funk—even though Halloween isn’t really a thing. Besides Fourth of July, it may be the most American phenomenon of all. Beat bruxaria translates as witchcraft beat in Portuguese. For the past decade or so, dressing up around the holiday has gained a little public popularity in Brazil’s cities—some people zombify themselves for Day of the Dead and do a Zombie Walk to funk music. Today’s genre is a year-round phenomenon though, more apt to soundtrack concerts in the favelas racking up hundreds of thousands of followers like Baile do Helipa. It pushes the limits of funk in a way that’s reminiscent of the darkness of Memphis rap-inspired genres like rare phonk with the chaos and DAW-maximalism of drift phonk or Dariacore. 

Beat bruxaria was a São Paulo invention by a collective of DJs and MCs, evolving as a more intense rendition of funk mandelão, which uses intense, blown-out beats and repeated vocal samples. That estoura tímpano (eardrum rupture) is a genre hallmark may be shocking to some, but this intensity acts as the cauldron that allows the DJ sorcerers of beat bruxaria to mix in their samples ranging from the funk mainstream to more horrorcore-inclined freakiness. Instead of saying let them cook, I guess you could say let them brew their potion.

In 22 minutes with the potential to neutralize the ear drums at the wrong decibel level, DJ d.silverstre in the title of the album [trans. “Scare Gringo”] and in its sound aims to cause such intense recoil to a listener so as to scare the unwilling off forever. To the open minded, you won’t regret entering the funk dungeon. How the disparate, distorted parts interlock and weave over each other masterfully, melting into one bass-boosted concoction, is another testament to the touch needed even to make something so unwieldy. “Tuin infanta idosa” [“Elderly Heart Attack”] is like a transmission from funk at the apocalypse’s onset, megaphone-sized vocals and unrelenting bass hammers striking like sonic meat tenderizers. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation getting to me, but the repetitive surrealism of “Oakley Oakley Oakley” feels dreamlike; whatever d.silvestre put in the concoction is evidently taking a hold. The album moves with tornado-force, but a seven-minute set on the closer slaps on increasing layers of industrial, ostentatious intensity, casting a potent spell.