On the Filters meadow, at the Rio Loco Festival in Toulouse, Marlon Silva aka DJ Marfox was once again preparing to deliver one of his epileptic sets strewn with a host of eclectic sounds (percussion, flutes, video game sound effects , synths straight out of a horror film, kalimbas, contraband voices tweaked then re-trafficked) and imprinted with all the urban genres that flourish in Portuguese-speaking Africa, from which it draws its origins. For more than ten years, he and his comrades from the collective and label Príncipe do import-export: they mop up Afro rhythms and trends, reinvent them in the resourceful spirit of the ghetto, and propel them onto stages around the world. He and his friends Nigga Fox and Narciso will be performing on April 14 at the Festival Banlieues Bleues.
Your sound, and that of your comrades from Principe, you call it “batida”: what does that mean to you?
Batida is the beating, like the beating of the heart. We need a heart to live, and I need the batida to live. This is my definition: your heart must be on the right frequency, and neither too slow nor too fast: the batida is the same.
How Marlon Silva became Marfox?
My parents are from São Tomé and Príncipe, but my brother and I were born in Portugal. My connection to the world of singers, musicians, comes from my father. You know, many artists from Portuguese-speaking Africa came to record their vinyls or their cassettes in Lisbon, in good studios. The problem is that they had no network to sell them to their community living in Europe. My father took care of that: he bought all their stock, and resold it, like a distributor. So my first contact with the world of music was all these artists who came by the house to see him: Africa Negra, Sangazuza, Camilo Dominguos… they came to our house and asked my father to buy their production. Most often, they stayed at home for lunch or dinner. I listened to their stories, even though I don’t speak Creole well. SSão Tomé and Príncipe. Sometimes, when we received, I put on music. My dad’s friends used to say look at your son, he’s a DJ. They were joking, but here I am now a professional DJ.
Your name Marfox, where does it come from? and those of your comrades from the Príncip collectivee (Lycox, Lilocox, Nigga Fox…) ?
I am the first Fox. In fact it starts from a kid’s delirium. When we were little, we had the Nintendo 64 console, and I had won mine during competitions at my school party. With the console, there was only one game: Starfox. And that’s where my friends called me not Marlon, but Marfox, and I kept it as my DJ name. My friends followed. Now there are millions of Fox!
You confided to PAM that it was after seeing the pioneer DJ Nervoso on stage that you had the click: you went from DJ to producer who invents his own sound. Can you tell us about the first experiences that followed?
At first I played in the community, because in Lisbon there are many immigrants who come from São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea Bissau… and then in 2006, for the start of the school year , with Nervoso and four other friends, we released the compilation DJs do Guetto. It was a small revolution. Among the tracks I produced on the compilation, there was “Funk em Kuduro”, a separate track, which sounded really different. And it was he, I believe, who opened the doors of the world to me.
Do you brew kuduro, funana, tarraxinha, kizomba… all these genres serve as common heritage and cement to the Afro-Lusophone diasporas?
I live with the diasporas, and I receive music from all these Portuguese-speaking African countries. I’m really happy about it, because this music reconnects us to our African history. My music, and even that of Principe, were born from that: at home we listened to certain sounds, at school with friends other sounds. So we were like in the middle of a bridge: are we more African? or more European? Nervoso created a sound that for me was a vision: it brought together music from Africa and Europe. This is the batida.
Basically, the batida embodies this spirit of the diasporas…
I like to say it’s Mediterranean music, because it’s right in the middle of two continents. Those who like it in Africa think it’s their music, and the same in Europe. A real mix.
Has electronics become a common language which has further opened the ears of young Europeans to African music?
Yes, first there are social networks. And then the production, which is often exclusively electronic, or almost. People are able to understand all music if you put it in the right context. We see examples of this in Príncipe as in Nyege Nyege: I have a traditional sound, and now I’m going to create a context for it so that it explodes more widely, and that it touches other people. We at Príncipe, we give your brain this supplement, and your brain asks for more. So you start looking. From there, it becomes easy to go further, because in Africa it is now easy to share music – via platforms, networks etc. The internet has given music and musicians from Africa a good largest exhibition in Europe. And I’m delighted that today many labels have been born after being inspired by what we did.
Do you believe that your success has facilitated better recognition of Afro-descendants in your country, Portugal?
For me already, music has changed my life. I was a street guy, and through my music I connected to people all over the world. Same for Lycox, Nigga fox…now you got loads of Afro-house artists playing all over the world. Who could have imagined it ten years ago? It makes me really happy because sometimes I go to play in Japan, or in Australia, and I realize that for the people there I represent Portugal. They tell me: I don’t know Portuguese music, but I know Príncipe.
Príncipe @Banlieues Bleues, April 14 at the Flèche d’Or (Paris 20)