Cargaa Cult

Nestled in the hills near Lisbon you'll find Quinta do Mocho, one of the city's many housing projects. While Lisbon's city centre is a charming hubbub of tourists strolling cobbled streets and admiring colonial architecture, the projects circling the city are an entirely different matter.

Clusters of high rises thrown up on the cheap in the 90s, scarcely served by public transport, they are far enough out to feel isolated. These blocks have been used as remote ghettos, places to shunt Portugal's predominantly Angolan and Cape Verdean immigrant population, keeping them out of sight and – barring the occasional police raid - out of mind. The buildings are decrepit. They have problems with the water supply and the walls are paper-thin. Like the ghettos of Hollywood imagination, it's not uncommon to come across a burnt-out car in the street.

But it's not all grim. In fact, Quinta do Mocho is quite remarkable. Recently, the local government decided to give the block a facelift. Rather than deal with the deep-seated structural problems afflicting the buildings themselves, they went for a quick fix publicity stunt, and invited a series of graffiti artists to paint huge murals on the sides of the blocks. Now, every other building is covered in vast, surrealist paintings, technicolour images of elves dreaming of cuboid abstractions, or vast diagrams showing how to construct an origami boat.

Amid all this random nonsense are two notable exceptions. One is an abstract collage that has the faces of several men embedded in it; the other is a huge, lifelike picture of one man's face. These two were chosen by the residents of Quinta do Mocho. The first work depicts DJ Marfox and the DJs Di Guetto Crew, the local producers instrumental in creating a frantic rave mutation of African pop so new it doesn't have a name, while the second, lone piece is a likeness of local legend DJ Nervoso, a DJ and producer who still lives round the corner, who virtually singlehandedly laid the ground-work for this new sound, and whose skill at rocking a party is spoken of in supernatural terms. In Quinta do Mocho the DJs come painted 50 feet tall.

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.

"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."

In many respects, Nervoso had created an African take on techno. Where Detroit innovators forced disco into repetitive machine loops, Nervoso had done the same with Angolan rhythms, creating mighty, trance-inducing locked grooves. He quickly became the most in-demand local DJ.

It was around this time that a local teenager called Marlon Silva started hanging around Nervoso's parties. He met him at a friend's house party in 2004 and was enthralled by the older DJ's style. Block party convention stated that DJs should stick to a playlist of Angolan pop and American r'n'b, but Nervoso was ripping up the rule book and ramping the party with his banging, skeletal productions. Marlon, who was already dabbling in DJing himself under the name Marfox (a reference to his constant playing of Nintendo's Star Fox game) decided to do the same. He got hold of a copy of Fruity Loops and got Nervoso to show him the ropes.

"Nervoso was the entry point," he remembers as we walk the sun-baked streets of Quinta do Mocho. "After Nervoso the sound started being accepted in different neighbourhoods, and each generation has opened the way to the next to be free to play their own productions in their DJ sets."

Crews sprung up. While many producers came from inside Quinta do Mocho, there were also the likes of NK and DJ Fofuxo, living further afield and swapping tunes online. As with Nervoso, their style was rooted in kuduro, taking the Angolan sound and rejecting the poppy elements, leaving hard, lean rhythms that hurtled along at 140 bpm. "Bringing the raw spiritual direction" is how NK puts it.

In the ghetto this proved hugely popular, and when, in 2006 Marfox, NK, Nervoso, Fofuxo, DJ Jesse and DJ Pausas released a free compilation called 'DJs Di Guetto' the scene had a clear statement of intent. But outside of the 'hood, the sound carried a stigma that lingers to this day.

"When I had the opportunity to play the African clubs," Marfox recalls, referring to Lisbon's few African-owned clubs in the city centre, "the owners would ask me not to play my own productions because they would cause trouble. They thought my music generated violence – which it didn't. The music generates a euphoric mood, but promoters assumed that the people dancing would get so wild they'd pull the club down, so they started blocking DJs playing."

Nervoso agrees. "I wasn't allowed to play after 3am in the African clubs – they thought there'd be fights and disruption if I played."

This led to a strange impasse. There was a flourishing scene of producers, and younger kids were breaking through; DJ Firmeza, who continued Nervoso's minimal percussive style, DJ Maboku, from the Northern Bairro do Pendão who, along with Lilocox, introduced more overt melodic content, and Nigga Fox (one of the many who took up using the ~Fox suffix, in homage to Marfox), whose freakish, off-kilter rhythms pushed the kuduro template into something quite bizarre. The creativity was there. The gigs weren't. There were no clubs willing to risk playing this music outside the ghetto, and the scene was trapped in a bottleneck.

[ Pictured above: DJ Liofox]

Then in 2007 Nelson Gomes stumbled across a show by Marfox. At the time Gomes ran promotions in Lisbon with his friend Pedro, bringing left of centre electronic acts to the city. Having grown up in the Vila Chã area, surrounded by African immigrants, Nelson had a predisposition towards sounds from the diaspora, and had gone to check out a concert featuring live acts from different 'hoods. When he heard a band performing over Marfox's beats he was instantly excited, and approached him, determined to work together. A relationship was sparked up, and when, a few years later, he discovered his friends Márcio Matos and José Moura were talking about starting a record label to promote Lisbon talent, it made perfect sense to bring them to Marfox. The parties came together and Príncipé records was born.

Rather than steam in and start waving around cash, Príncipe took a different route. In 2011 they put out one record from Marfox, and then set up Noite Príncipe, a club night at the city's Music Box venue where he could play his style, as he wanted, unimpeded.

"That was a process of building trust," notes the quietly impassioned Jose Moura "with the club night we came into touch with other producers and DJs, and they could see the impact of their music when they played it live."

After initial suspicion, Marfox was sold. "I was used to the African nights were the people didn't pay attention to the DJ, they just did their own thing. At this party it felt like it was the first time people were actually watching me, and rating what I did as important." He spread the word among his friends, and quickly the night became the testing ground for this new, still nameless sound – as Márcio Matos tells us.

"Some nights a DJ brings that moment where everyone in the club is going fucking nuts, and it's ten minutes of total euphoria. People chant to the beats, it's a very communal thing, it's so intense even just to watch."

Finally given a platform, it was inevitable that news would spread. Earlier this year Warp records announced that they were releasing a selection of Lisbon artists, sourced through Príncipe. 'Cargaa' is the name Warp are giving the tracks – a Portugese slang term that roughly means 'banger'. The artists also use the terms 'kuduro' and 'batida' (Marfox says batida is "the same word for when your heart beats when you have a car crash"), but some of the producers just say they make house or electro – despite the fact that their music sounds nothing like either.

Now DJs like Marfox and Firmeza are being flown worldwide – a remarkable turnaround for producers who could barely get a gig in their home town a couple of years back. One thing hasn't change, though: they still live in the ghetto, which for many means Quinta do Mocho remains home. Here, despite the knackered buildings and petty crime, they can hang in a tight-knit community, put their speakers out their windows to blast new tracks to the people who first raved to their sounds, and note with pride the huge murals that prove just how far they've come.

DJ Marfox, Nidia Minaj and DJ Firmeza play The Clock Strikes 13 in London on October 9