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Cargaa Cult
The Quinta do Mocho housing estate outside Lisbon is the cradle of a uniquely African take on techno
Nervoso was 12 years old when he fled war-torn Angola for Quinta do Mocho. It was 1997, and he quickly fell in with a crew of local guys who were DJing at parties around the neighbourhood. They were playing a mix of Angolan genres, from the downtempo, r'n'b- influenced kizomba right through to kuduro, the country's predominant dance sound, in which traditional Angolan drum patterns collide with house, pop and hip hop. Nervoso was hooked and would scour Lisbon's second-hand markets for Angolan mixtapes, absorbing as much as he could. His biggest influence was DJ Znobia, an Angolan DJ who was pioneering a slow, stripped-down version of kizomba he called tarraxinha (which loosely translates as 'the moment a man penetrates a woman') When the young Nervoso tried to recreate Tarraxinha he decided to break it down to basics, removing almost everything other than syncopated snares rushing and clattering over a kick-drum. Then he sped the whole thing up. In the process he made something compellingly new.
"All I did was catch the mood and create a more danceable thing," Nervoso says through a translator as we sit in his living room. "In Angola, if people don't know the specific dance steps to a song they don't dance, so I was trying to create something that anyone could dance to." This approach yielded startling results, and laid the foundation for Nervoso's status as local icon. In person, he's a quiet, assured presence, small, taciturn, bulky from working on building sites. But when he talks about the parties in the early 00s that first made him a star in the hood, an infectious grin spreads across his face. [Pictured right: Marfox]
"When I was invited to play a party, on the day of the event I'd make one or two new tracks to play on Fruity Loops. One time I tried a different thing – I blended just two loops, one from each track, cutting back and forth between them, and I carried on doing it for two hours The people got so high on the rhythm and the repetition that they started doing gymnastic moves, they were flipping on the floor, up the wall, standing on their hands, going crazy! Then they started ripping my clothes off, and their clothes off. It got completely wild! In the end I was only in my shorts so I had to stop playing the loops…
"This was on a Saturday through to a Sunday. The next Sunday a load of people called me asking if I could do the same loop at a different party. People there had bought a load of whisky and had shown up just to hear that loop. It got very wild."
