Batida, the umbrella term for the variant strains of dance music coming from the ghettos perched in the hills surrounding Lisbon proper, roughly translates to "my beat" in Portuguese. As DJ Marfox, the scene's unofficial current figurehead, explained earlier this year, it's also "the same word for when your heart beats when you have a car crash." It's perfect sensory context for the heavily percussive polyrhythms streaming from these isolated projects, mostly filled with emigrants from Angola, São Tomé E Príncipe, and other former Portuguese colonies: jarring, frantic, but alive.
But for years, there was no platform for batida producers to release any of this stuff; it existed communally—in the Quinta do Mocho and Quinta da Vitória and other remote housing projects, built hastily after Portugal's 1974 revolution brought a sea of immigrants from former colonies to the crowded city—or not at all. Then came Príncipe Discos, a tight-knit local label fiercely devoted to "100% real contemporary dance music coming out of this city, its suburbs, projects and slums." Since their first release in 2011, DJ Marfox's Eu Sei Quem Sou EP (or "I Know Who I Am"), the label has been committed to respectfully representing and propagating these singular, community-driven sounds.
The label's latest is Alma Do Meu Pai, a six-track EP from DJ Firmeza, a producer and DJ born in Portugal but of Angolan descent. At 20, he is one of the batida scene's younger members, but his first solo release on the label is refined and mature. Within the Príncipe catalog, Firmeza is more of a minimalist than peers like DJ Nigga Fox. Melody is almost never a factor on Alma Do Meu Pai, which translates to "Soul of My Father" in honor of his recently deceased dad. His focus is percussion above all else—sparse, efficient, streamlined. Closing track "Suposto" evokes a soca rhythm whittled down and deconstructed; a lilting flute traipses through the remains, head-faking towards melody before it becomes a percussive element itself. You don't see it coming.
Most batida tracks are short, two-minute bursts, suited for dancers' wandering attention spans. But the title track "Alma Do Meu Pai" clocks in at over six minutes, churning and lurching at a breathless 143 BPM. At a glance, it's repetitive; it's easy to let it all blur together and submit to its current. But with focus, you notice subtle deviations in rhythm, the layers, the way the percussive components move in connection with one another. But instead of cold metallics, this stuff feels warm, organic, very much human, as though each element of a track is part of a larger conversation.
It's tempting to explore Alma Do Meu Pai in parallel with underground dance genres like footwork or grime. The movements function in socially similar ways, forging stunningly unique sounds and dances from urban tensions. But batida is different. As Pedro Gomes, one of Príncipe's four label heads, emphasized: "This is not techno, this is not house, this is not dubstep, this is not grime—this is this, it's not anything else, so if you want this... present this for what it is." Alma Do Meu Pai, then, is a calm, strange, and deceptively simple study in what can be wrung out of rhythm. It is music for dancing, and for contemplation. And though it is not an explicitly political record, the fact that we are hearing it at all, from the remote projects of Lisbon the city itself forgot, is a political act in itself.
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