Submundo 808: The Sonic Apparition

In June 2025, I attended a baile funk party organized by the São Paulo-based collective Submundo 808 on the outskirts of Brazil’s federal capital. What I encountered there came as an unexpected revelation. As a foreign resident in Brasília, I was already familiar with bruxaria, ritmada, mandelão, and adjacent strands of extreme Brazilian funk through the internet and the city’s more gentrified club circuit. Submundo 808’s event was not a street party, but its peripheral location drew a crowd largely from the urban margins, producing a markedly different atmosphere.

Over the course of many hours, the lineup assembled some of the most inventive figures in contemporary Brazilian funk — among them d.Silvestre, DJ Caio Prince, TH4YS, Adame DJ, and Bonekinha Iraquiana. In all honesty, it was the most disorienting club night I had experienced since the early 2010s, when the emergence of post-club and “deconstructed club” music first gave me a glimpse of something beyond the eternal boredom of techno, house, and drum’n’bass.

The post-club movement has long since passed its peak, but at Submundo 808 I was struck by a similar sensation: the shock of encountering a sonic future so excessive in novelty that it overwhelms perception itself, triggering cascades of images: cyberpunk favelas, Afro-Brazilian rituals on alien planets, dark masses for the end of this world.

What initially recalled post-club was the density of experimentation: abrasive samples, violently chopped vocals, abrupt rhythmic collapses. DJs rode waves of sonic chaos, leaping from 808 barrages at 180 BPM into prolonged fields of white noise, only to snap back into warped pop hooks. Still, unlike much post-club music of the 2010s — quite notorious for being “head” music — the Submundo event was intensely corporeal. Beneath its sci-fi sound design ran a syncopated Afro-Brazilian rhythmic intelligence that anchored the music in the hips.

When I texted a Brazilian political scientist friend that I was mesmerized by what I jokingly called “deconstructed favela music,” she replied with a curt implication that I was being a racist idiot. In a certain sense, she was right to call out the reflex. The assumption that the avant-garde belongs to art schools and to the children of the privileged classes, rather than to the street, the hood, the racialized working class, remains one of colonial modernity’s most persistent prejudices. [1]

Yet there we were: hundreds of people from peripheral neighborhoods dancing for hours to what might only be described as rhythmically complex industrial noise music. After around three in the morning, a strange trance seemed to descend on the room. Perception slowed; eye movements dulled; a sensation of hypnosis — possession? — set in. Bruxaria, i.e. witchcraft, for real.

One could, of course, draw parallels between funk bruxaria and early-2010s witch house — not only because of the coincidence of names, but also because of a shared fascination with distortion, occult atmospheres, and digital gloom (d.Silvestre once cited Crystal Castles as an influence). Yet here witchcraft did not appear as a matter of surface aesthetics. It was not simply the presence of atabaque samples and other Afro-religious signifiers; something was taking hold, working through sound. It was this experience that prompted me to begin tracing baile funk’s entanglements with ancestrality, science fiction, and ritual sound practice. What follows are provisional notes from that ongoing inquiry.

A Doomscroll Made Audible

First, some basic terms should be clarified. Bruxaria is a subgenre of funk mandelão, the generic term for baile funk played in São Paulo’s fluxos (street parties). The genre emerged in the late 2010s. Its name apparently derives from baile do Mandela, a party in Praia Grande, São Paulo. [2] Compared with classical Rio funk carioca of the 2000s, mandelão is generally darker, heavier, and more synthbased. Another major subgenre is ritmada, which is more percussive — often sampling Afro-Brazilian instruments such as atabaques and berimbaus — more melodic, and somewhat lighter. Where bruxaria is brutal and apocalyptic, ritmada tends to be more erotic and swing-driven.

Importantly, bruxaria has evolved primarily in the favelas of SP’s South Zone (Heliópolis, Paraísopolis), while ritmada is more common in the North Zone. As of 2026, ritmada appears to be more dominant at street bailes. This text considers mandelão as a whole but focuses on bruxaria, which is arguably more theoretically interesting.

At parties organized by collectives such as Submundo 808, bruxaria and ritmada often blend, though their core traits remain distinguishable. In contrast to ritmada, bruxaria relies more heavily on abrasive synthesizers, a dominant 808 sub-bass, and, most recognizably, an ultra-high-pitched tuin sound: a piercing siren said to resemble the auditory hallucinations induced by lança-perfume, a drug popular at São Paulo’s street parties. The first documented use of tuin dates back to MC Bin Laden’s 2014 track Lança de Coco; other tracks that used tuin in that period include
MC Carioca’s Tu tá moscando. In these early instances, tuin functioned primarily as a special effect. In bruxaria, by contrast, it has become a core instrument — layered and rhythmically patterned. [3]

While bruxaria should be understood as a collective creation dating back to early pandemic, rather than a work of a lone genius, it is probably fair to say that DJ K’s Pánico no submundo — released in 2023 on Nyege Nyege Tapes — best represents the genre’s condensed essence. Built from dense, claustrophobic collages, the album layers looped fragments of manic laughter, aggressively distorted synths, sampled speeches on authoritarianism and genocide, air-raid sirens, eerie Indigenous flutes, and alien rhythmic structures explicitly designed to “distort the mind.” It is a hallucinatory descent into the psychic debris of the 2020s, where political catastrophe, digital paranoia, and street-level delirium blur into a single affective field.

Funk bruxaria articulates the Zeitgeist of the 2020s with unusual precision. Since the pandemic, it has often felt as though the gates of the inferno — the submundo invoked both by DJ K and by Submundo 808 — have been forced open. The monsters that once lurked there now clamor for attention in a grotesque reality show of permanent emergency. Bruxaria gives sound to this menagerie: psychotic clowns and apocalyptic warnings, zombies on crack, the Illuminati, militarized states of exception, car sound systems tearing through favelas under siege, and strategies of sonic intimidation that verge on acoustic warfare. And presiding over it all is bruxaria itself — witchcraft — as captured by the now-legendary tag line: “DJ K não tá mais produzindo, tá fazendo bruxaria” — “DJ K isn’t producing anymore; he’s doing witchcraft.”

For a long time, I was puzzled by the fact that baile funk — a genre traditionally associated with the tropicalist, sunny vibe of Rio de Janeiro — has, in recent years, become so hard and grim, so pesadão. This transformation has been underway for at least a decade, mainly in São Paulo. Funk bruxaria in particular seems tailor-made as a soundtrack for an era of rising political authoritarianism and diffuse global warfare, resonating with similarly “nihilist” electronic genres from elsewhere — one might think, for instance, of Eastern Europe’s electro-punk, which has even entered into creative dialogues with hard Brazilian funk. Yet while in places like Russia or Ukraine the popularity of such aesthetics can be readily explained by the omnipresent specter of war and authoritarianism, São Paulo funk’s descent into darkness likely cannot be attributed primarily to geopolitical concerns.

In the documentary Terror Mandelão, DJ K remarks that “Pánico no Submundo is the panic we live in the favelas, but turned into music.” Along similar lines, in the São Paulo episode of Funk do Brasil featuring @Mochakk, mandelão producer MU540 explains that bruxaria has developed its abrasive sonic language in the South Zone favelas of São Paulo as a response to the sustained police repression experienced in these communities over the years. Funk bruxaria, in this sense, is a scar carried by these communities, inscribed into sound.

One of the most notorious expressions of this necropolitical regime, likely referred to by MU540, was the 2019 “massacre of Paraisópolis,” in which nine young people were killed during a military police operation at a street baile funk. The deaths occurred amid panic and a crowd crush triggered by the raid, during which police fired tear gas and rubber bullets and reportedly blocked escape routes. None of the twelve officers involved were ever held accountable. The party was known as baile da DZ7. That same year, 2019, also saw the release of BRUXARIA NA DZ7 (Witchcraft on DZ7), by MCs GW, Vuiziki, and Buraga, produced by DJ Olliver — the first track known to explicitly reference bruxaria in its title. [4] BRUXARIA NA DZ7 already contained the genre’s defining sonic signatures.

There was the looped laughter; a gothic atmosphere conjured through a sampled classical choir; the syncopated baile funk pulse (tum tcha tcha, tum tcha) rendered through a harsh synthesizer, and a vocal delivery that approximated ritual incantation more than rap, doing new justice to the original meaning of the term MC as “master of ceremony.”
Fast-forward to the mid-2020s, and Baile da DZ7 is no longer remembered primarily as the site of the massacre, but rather as the cradle of funk bruxaria itself, with DJs and MCs from the DZ7 crew now performing in Europe, Japan and Australia.

A Sonic Accelerationism in the Tropics

To this day, little has been written about baile funk, and even less about its contemporary digital mutations, such as bruxaria or ritmada. Most of the existing scholarship consists of Master’s and PhD theses, a handful of which have later appeared as books. As funk researcher, artist, and social media personality Thiago Barbosa Alves de Souza, alias Thiagson, argues in Putologia Avançada: Musicologia do Funk — his 2024 doctoral dissertation and, to date, likely the only extended academic study devoted specifically to mandelão and its subgenres — this absence of critical literature will not be easily remedied. Funk is fundamentally an oral and rhizomatic tradition: a body of knowledge transmitted through fluxos, social media, memes, and informal circuits, rather than through institutions, archives, or canonical texts.

A paradox follows from this situation. While outside Brazil baile funk increasingly circulates within avant-garde and experimental electronic music contexts — as evidenced by releases on Nyege Nyege Tapes, or the NTS compilation of São Paulo funk — within Brazil the genre remains broadly devalued. Conservatives condemn funk for explicit sexuality and its supposed proximity to crime; sectors of the cultural middle class dismiss it as vulgar or tasteless. Even sympathetic intellectuals tend to defend funk only insofar as it can be framed as “resistance” or as an “authentic” expression of favela culture.[5] In either case, funk is rarely taken seriously on sonic terms. As Thiagson observes, “the way funk sounds are produced is frequently ignored in public debate. Everything is subordinated to social, political, and racial discussions.”[6]

Such an approach was, to some extent, understandable in the 1990s and early 2000s, when baile funk still revolved around the figure of the MC. Beats were often imported and repetitive, while long, narrative, and frequently socially critical lyrics served as the primary markers of difference from one track to another. Funk was therefore commonly understood as a Brazilian mutation of hip-hop rather than electronic music — a perception reinforced by the fact that many canonical tracks of the period even carried the word “rap” in their titles (Rap da Felicidade, Rap das Armas, and so on).

Around that time, baile funk genres were organized along a lyrical axis: funk consciente (politically aware), putaria (sexually explicit), proibidão (gangsta, “forbidden”), or ostentação (materialist and aspirational). Today, as Thiagson notes, putaria has almost completely taken over. While individual MCs still occasionally produce socially conscious tracks, proibidão and ostentação have largely disappeared as distinct categories. Yet even as putaria claims a near-total monopoly at the level of themes, the lyrics themselves have lost much of their former centrality.

This shift began in the 2000s and would only fully crystallize in the 2020s. As beats became increasingly original and differentiated, lyrics grew shorter, simpler, and more generic; today, they are often reduced to sampled fragments rather than full verses. Vocals now function less as carriers of narrative meaning than as atmospheric markers of genre and affect. Even tracks whose titles suggest political content frequently rely on putaria samples. The declining centrality of lyrics coincided with the rise of the DJ or producer as the principal creative figure. By the mid-2020s, baile funk was increasingly perceived — at least by foreign audiences — as a form of electronic music. Within Brazil, however, this shift has been far from straightforward. Rave culture has long been associated with the culture of the playboy, i.e., the white upper-middle-class youth, and funk’s incorporation into electronic music frameworks has therefore remained socially and culturally contested.

Today’s massive proliferation of underground funk subgenres unfolds primarily along the axis of production. The largely Euro-white South tends to favor more linear beats. These EDM-inflected blends are known as rave funk, mega funk, or funk automotivo. To the extent that they flirt with rave music — starting with a four to-the-floor 808 kick drum, and translating the syncopated baile funk tum tcha tcha, tum tcha into a synthesizer line — they bear a family resemblance to bruxaria. Nevertheless, they are generally lighter, more polished, and more “middle class”.

Rio de Janeiro, by contrast, has developed styles such as funk 150 bpm, afrofunk, or beat bolha (bubble beat): accelerated rhythms with a more pronounced swing, influenced by afro-house and marked by a warmer, more “tropicalist” feeling. Funk from Belo Horizonte — funk BH — tends to be more atmospheric and minimalist. In the work of producers like DJ Anderson do Paraíso or DJ WS da Igrejinha, it takes on a darkly erotic, gothic tone. The Amazon region has its tecnofunk, a bright and bouncy blend of baile funk with regional electronic dance traditions. Other regional mutations include brega funk in Recife or beat fino in Espírito Santo. Finally, there is the controversy surrounding so-called “Brazilian phonk,” a largely online doppelgänger of baile funk, at times produced by foreign artists with little contact with the actual funk scene in Brazil.

As British sound philosopher Kodwo Eshun once argued, critical approaches to modern Black music tend to treat rhythm as something ineffable or intuitive — beyond analytical description — while directing interpretive energy toward reading music as political resistance. As Eshun writes, “in almost all accounts, people immediately look over, they literally look over the vinyl to whatever transcendent logic they can use, instead of actually starting with the vinyl.” This is not to dismiss social or political analysis as such, but to note that, when it becomes unilateral, it often results in a failure to take seriously the sonic and textural dimensions of the music itself: the worlds it constructs and the theories of reality it already articulates through sound.

For Eshun, genres such as funk, disco, hip-hop, techno, or jungle offered privileged tools for thinking Afrofuturism — the concept of Blackness in modernity as alien, displaced, and compelled to function as a vanguard of machinic deterritorialization. In a similar way, I propose to understand funk mandelão as a philosophy of the Brazilian urban periphery: a way of thinking the present conditions of a highly digital society, but one in which ancestral rituals, the macumbas, were not erased, but abstracted and reinserted into a sci-fi present. With its alien sound design and accelerated cadence, funk mandelão articulates an Afrofuturist mode of Blackness that has few equivalents in contemporary Brazilian culture.

Anyone active on theory-Twitter around the pandemic will have noticed the remarkable popularity that accelerationism and Ccru philosophy — including the Afrofuturism of Kodwo Eshun — gained among Brazil’s hyper-online circles from the late 2010s onward. For many, this came as a surprise. Brazilian critical theory had previously been more closely associated with the discourse of cosmopolitics — Indigenous cosmologies and rooted ecological thinking, epistemic decolonization, Amerindian perspectivism, etc. — as canonized by the 2014 conference Os Mil Nomes de Gaia, organized in Rio de Janeiro by figures such as Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The vision of Blackness aligned with this cosmopolitical horizon is perhaps best condensed in the figure of the quilombo — the free village founded by runaway slaves, imagined as a return to a life connected to the earth and to the more-than-human world; a Black animism that once existed in Africa, and that was never quite lost.

Where quilombo philosophy — iconically articulated by the late thinker Antônio Bispo dos Santos, also known as Nêgo Bispo — is territorial and organic, associating “synthetic” modes of existence exclusively with colonial Euromodernity, [9] the Afrofuturism developed by figures such as Kodwo Eshun explicitly embraces the synthetic as a vector of liberation from the constraints of organic tradition. And yet, when accelerationism was received in Brazil, there was little difficulty in reading authors like Bispo and Eshun side by side; the “contradiction” between their positions was often left unresolved. One could thus observe how accelerationism was devoured and transformed through the influence of ancestral philosophies, perspectivism, and shamanism — a mutation of the post-ACC philosophy in the tropics, as attested by the recent issue of the philosophy journal DasQuestões devoted to the Ccru .



This process might be described as an anthropophagic reception — a devouring — of Euromodern futurism, [10] a practice with a long history in the Brazilian avantgarde. Antropofagia is a foundational concept in Brazilian modernist thought, coined by Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s to designate a practice of devouring cultural artifacts from foreign cultures — particularly those of the colonizer. [11] The culture of the other is embraced not in order to be imitated, but to be metamorphosed. Like the Tupi cannibal who consumes the enemy in order to absorb his powers —
gaining mastery over his names or ritual songs — Western culture is imported as a substance to be metabolized and transformed in the stomach of non-Western culture through the anthropophagic ritual. Antropofagia thus emerges as a strategy that sidesteps the traps of both colonial mimicry and the fascism of “authentic” tradition.

In sum, Western futurism is devoured and reanimated through a different rhythm— less linear and uptight, more syncopated and sensual. After all, what does the popular imagination associate with the anthropophagic ritual, the site of metamorphosis? Setting aside the horror of eating human flesh, one might glimpse a utopia of festivity: nakedness, excess, dance around a fire, free love, and relentless, “savage” drumming. In antropofagia, modernity is embraced, but without its repressive aspect.

Ritmofagia I: The Genealogy of Tamborzão

It was already Hermano Vianna who proposed, in the conclusion of his seminal essay Mundo funk carioca (The World of Funk Carioca) — the first monograph on Brazilian funk, written in the late 1980s — that funk be understood as an anthropophagic practice, one in which the ceremonial banquet consists of Western hip-hop and electronic music. Obvious parallels could be drawn with samba, a movement that was taking shape around the same time that Oswald de Andrade was writing his manifestos.

In that case, formerly enslaved people in Brazil absorbed European salon music — polkas, waltzes — along with European instruments such as the guitar, and reworked them through a far more syncopated and rhythmically complex sensibility, one that could be traced directly to the ritual songs of candomblé and macumba. One may also recall the moral shock provoked early on by samba’s sexualized dance forms, themselves popularly associated with AfroBrazilian rituals.

While European harmonic and melodic structures initially dominated samba, African-derived polyrhythmic logics gradually asserted themselves, overtaking and reshaping the form from within.[12] Borrowing a term from DJ paran0ia’s excellent 2024 mandelão release, one could call this practice of rhythmic anthropophagy ritmofagia. We can observe its logic repeating itself in the context of late twentieth-century sound system culture. The history of baile funk is commonly traced back to the late 1950s and the emergence of so-called hi-fi parties — also known as festas americanas, the “American parties” — in Rio de Janeiro. [13] At these events, young people gathered to dance and drink to imported North American rock’n’roll and pop music. These parties also developed a specifically Black iteration in Rio’s suburbs, emerging from the Black Rio movement of the late 1960s, where styles such as soul, funk, and later hip-hop, Miami bass, electro-funk, and Latin freestyle were played.

The bailes attracted tens of thousands of people every weekend, but there was still no funk carioca in the musical sense of the term: no lyrics in Portuguese, no original beats. And yet, as Vianna notes in Mundo funk carioca, one could already discern an anthropophagic practice at work in the culture of the party itself:

“It would have been easier, more “natural,” to have samba bailes, rock bailes, or other kinds of music that are readily accessible to those who live in Rio. But the DJs opt for rarity. In a certain sense, we are faced here with an example of what Oswald de Andrade calls anthropophagy: “I am only interested in what is not mine.” […] Funk arrives in Rio and is devoured in an unprecedented way. There are no bailes like these anywhere else in the world. Certain elements appear in other cities, but the combination of this kind of dance, this kind of clothing, this kind of music, this mode of organization of sound crews, and the DJ’s mode of performance exists only in the world of funk carioca.” [14]

From the perspective of today’s mandelão, it seems striking that Vianna initially understood funk primarily as an anthropophagic digestion of North American hiphop culture, rather than of electronic music. Clearly, MCs and dancers occupied the foreground of the scene in the late-1980s and 1990s. Yet the genealogy of the sound itself already pointed elsewhere. The very term “funk” — which came to signify something quite different in Brazil than elsewhere — appears to have originated as shorthand for electro-funk. [15] Tracks such as Kraftwerk’s Boing Boom Tschak circulated widely, and the influence of Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock was paradigm-shifting. [16] The decisive rupture, however, came with the dissemination of 808 Beatapella Mix, from DJ Battery Brain’s single 8 Volt Mix.



Soon known simply as the Volt Mix, the track began circulating in Brazil as a sampled instrumental loop over which MCs would rap, marking the first iteration of what would later be recognized as baile funk. DJ Marlboro Apresenta Funk Brasil 01 is generally considered the first baile funk album proper: the first full-length release built around the Volt Mix base and featuring lyrics in Portuguese.

Mapping the rhythmic DNA of baile funk as a cannibalization of Black electronic music by Afro-Brazilian polyrhythmic sensibility is the task undertaken by Renan Ribeiro Moutinho in his crucial 2020 PhD dissertation at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The central contribution of the thesis lies in its reconstruction, based on interviews with the producers involved, of the emergence of the iconic Tamborzão [17] rhythm (tum tcha tcha, tum tcha), which would later become synonymous with funk carioca as such. Tamborzão introduced a characteristically syncopated and percussive flavor to the genre, making it “Brazilian”: closer in sensibility not only to samba, but also to Afro-Brazilian ritual and religious practices. Tamborzão was recorded by DJ Luciano Oliveira in 1997 and first appeared in the track Rap da Vila Comari by MCs Tito and Xandão, still superposed onto the Volt Mix. According to Moutinho, the first track to use Tamborzão exclusively as a rhythmic basis was MC Mascote’s 1998 O comando é vermelho,, from the gangster subgenre proibidão. By the turn of the millennium, Tamborzão had assumed a near total hegemony in funk carioca, a position it would maintain into the late 2000s.

Despite this genesis, Tamborzão should not be understood as an isolated invention of a single genius, since attempts to “Brazilianize” baile funk had already been underway throughout the 1990s. Samba groups and football fan blocs performed Volt Mix on percussion; bands like Funk’n’Lat did what some described as baile “funk with samba school instruments.” [18] Funk DJs layered percussion sampled from instrumental samba compilations over the Volt Mix. Percussive Latin freestyle tracks — such as Warp 9’s Light Years Away, known in funk circles as Melô da Macumba (“witchcraft melody”) — circulated widely. DJs such as Alessandro, or sound systems like Equipe Pipo blended the Volt Mix with live berimbau — the single-string, bow-like instrument played rhythmically with a stick that accompanies capoeira. Taken together, these experiments constituted some of the earliest baile funk montagens, made possible by early samplers imported into the carioca suburbs in the early 1990s. [19]

One such early attempt was Montagem Macumba Lelê (1995), by DJs Alessandro and Cabide. The track, which preceded Tamborzão by some three years, opens with the recognizable syncopated tum tcha tcha, tum tcha, played on congas. When Moutinho asks DJ Alessandro, in an interview for his dissertation, where this rhythm comes from, Alessandro explains that the title itself resulted from a miscommunication: it was meant to be maculelê. The rhythm is indeed identical to the best-known pattern from maculelê — the Afro-Brazilian dance and stick-fighting rhythm often performed alongside capoeira — here played on congas and berimbau and layered over the Volt Mix.

Beyond maculelê, this same rhythmic figure is also known as congo de ouro, one of the most widespread rhythms in the Afro-Brazilian repertoire. In candomblé, where it is used at the opening of ceremonies to summon the orixás, it appears under the name Avamunha. According to Moutinho, the fundamental rhythmic structure of congo de ouro corresponds to a traditional “timeline pattern” found across diverse ethnic traditions in parts of Central-West Africa — notably in what are today the DRC and Angola. Such patterns, often articulated on instruments like the agogô, function as temporal anchors, stabilizing and coordinating more complex polyrhythmic layers. [20]

As DJ Luciano Oliveira explains in an interview conducted by Moutinho, when he first recorded the Tamborzão on a sampler, Macumba Lelê was his explicit reference. In that earlier track, the syncopated congo de ouro rhythm occupied only the upper registers of the spectrum, played by conga drums, while the low-frequency domain necessary for sound-system resonance remained dependent on the 808 sub-bass kick of the Volt Mix. Tamborzão emerged precisely from the need to resolve this division. In other words, although the 1990s saw numerous attempts to superpose or hybridize Afro-Brazilian percussion with the machinic futurism of electro-funk, only with Tamborzão did these experiments crystallize into a genuine fusion: an alchemical synthesis in which previously disparate elements coalesced into a qualitatively new rhythmic unity. [21]

As Czech–Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser once argued, the positive essence of Brazil is to be found in such acts of “synthesis” — which must, however, be carefully distinguished from mere “mixtures.” As Flusser writes:

“Synthesis is not mixture. The obvious difference is this: in mixture, the ingredients lose part of their structure in order to unite at the lowest common denominator. In synthesis, the ingredients are elevated to a new level, at which they reveal aspects that were previously concealed. Mixture is the result of an entropic process; synthesis results from negative entropy. Obviously, Brazil is a country of mixture. But potentially, through a qualitative leap, it is a country of synthesis.” [22]

If Tamborzão can be understood as a paradigmatic example of “synthesis” in this Flusserian sense, it is because it reveals something that was virtually present, yet occluded, within each of its constitutive elements. What congo de ouro revealed in the LA electro-funk’s Volt Mix was its syncopated, non-Western lineage. As Thiagson points out, the Volt Mix is itself an Afro-diasporic rhythm, and the non-linear “congo de ouro” timeline was already embedded in its kick–snare pattern. It was, however, effectively masked by a layer of linear, and much more “Western-sounding,” cymbals. What Tamborzão accomplishes is the unveiling of Volt Mix’s latent rhythmic structure through a process of reduction — a stripping away of the linear cymbal progression — as becomes evident in the drum-rack diagram below.

In turn, what did the Volt Mix reveal within congo de ouro? I would argue: a radically futurist sensibility that has little to do with any static notion of “folklore”, to which Afro-diasporic traditions are so often confined. There is nothing fixed or timeless about ancestral Afro-diasporic practices; on the contrary, they are intrinsically experimental and future-oriented. It was precisely this dimension that Félix Guattari sought to foreground when, toward the end of his life, he traveled extensively in Brazil and coined the term machinic animism. Against any romantic or primitivist reading, Guattari emphasized the profoundly creative, technical, and modernist — that is, machinic — character of Afro-Brazilian ritual traditions such as candomblé. For him, these ancestral practices function as a “reserve” of “non-logocentric means of expression, capable of articulating themselves in completely original forms of expression”. [23]

Thus, just as Ogum — the orixá of war, metallurgy, and agriculture — comes to be associated with science, industrial labor, and even robotics [24], so too does congo de ouro undergo a process of radical deterritorialization. Transplanted into the machinic environment of samplers, sound systems, and sub-bass frequencies, it reemerges as
Tamborzão; pushed further into the split registers of bruxaria, it enters the hyperdigital present of algorithmic control, automated perception, and AI-mediated warfare.

Ritmofagia II: Berimbau do Cyberpunk

By the early 2010s, the Tamborzão era of baile funk gradually gave way to what became known as the Beatbox phase. Popularized above all by Mr. Catra, beatbox tracks vocally mimicked the Tamborzão pattern, pushing rhythmic abstraction towards an extreme minimalism. Because the mouth is a naturally monophonic “instrument,” beatboxing inevitably suppresses certain percussive emissions, resulting in an even more minimalist, skeletal pulse. According to Thiagson, it was precisely this process of rhythmic reduction that opened the space for a new cycle of sonic experimentation.

Around 2015, producers in São Paulo re-synthesized this vocal minimalism using metallic percussive samples, giving rise to what became known as beat panela (frying-pan beat) or beat lata (can beat). This phase translated the austerity of beatbox into a machinic register: the stripped-down rhythmic architecture was retained, while timbral differentiation was reintroduced through the increasingly available digital audio workstations (DAWs). The resulting aggressive metallic sonorities came to be strongly associated with São Paulo, and were largely popularized through the ostentação subgenre in the mid-2010s by artists such as MC Bin Laden.

In retrospect, when listening to compilations from the “golden era” of Tamborzão — such as Furacão 2000’s Tornando Muito Nervoso 2 — it is striking how relatively monotonous funk production could be at the time: the vast majority of tracks relied on the same rhythmic base. The post-Beatbox phase in São Paulo coincided with an accelerated diversification of rhythmic foundations. It was during this period that the cult of the MC began to wane, while the figure of the DJ or producer gradually moved to the foreground. It is also noteworthy how beat panela brought funk closer to Afro-Brazilian aesthetic logics. Because the metallic percussive sample was typically articulated across several pitches, the sound would come to resemble the agogô [25] — the Yoruba-derived instrument widely used in candomblé, capoeira, and samba, consisting of two differently sized metal bells.

The agogô is a “semi-harmonic” instrument: its bells resonate at distinct pitches, producing a metallic timbre that occupies an ambiguous zone between rhythm and tone. Although these pitches are not usually tuned to fixed notes, the rhythmic pattern itself unfolds as a cyclical sequence of differentiated heights. As Thiagson notices, this semi-harmonic principle is central to several Afro-Brazilian instruments — apart from agogô, for example berimbau — and resurfaces in post-Beatbox funk, including mandelão, where the syncopated rhythmic matrix becomes semi-melodic or melodic. It is also curious to note how the metallic timbre of beat panela evokes not only Afro-Brazilian ritual traditions through the agogô, but also the use of industrial sounds in Western avant-garde music of the 1980s. As this industrial legacy resurfaced in the 2010s with the rise of so-called deconstructed club music, it was perhaps during this same period that post-club scenes began turning their attention toward the strangely minimalist, glitchy sonic chaos of Brazilian funk.

Mandelão would later push this metallic abstraction beyond austerity. Where beat panela reduced the funk matrix to a rigid, skeletal cycle, mandelão — and bruxaria in particular — reinflates it through excess, multiplying breaks and exaggerating contrasts. The first track to explode virally with the bruxaria sound, in early 2020, was DJ Mandrake’s MONTAGEM – BOMBA DE NAGASAKI.[26] The track introduced what Thiagson considers the genre’s quintessential sonic signature: every 4/4 bar opens with a deep, resonant 808 kick, while the rest of the funk rhythmic framework is articulated through a piercing, high-pitched synthesizer. The result is a deliberate frequency split — ultra-low against ultra-high — that came to be associated with bruxaria. In Thiagson’s terms, the genre is defined by the following three points:

1. High intensity resulting in clipping and distortion.

2. An extreme construction of pitch registers: a heavy, accentuated low sound is used on the first beat, while high-pitched sounds occupy the remaining beats. In contrast to the initial low sound — whose exact frequency is often indeterminate — the high sounds usually form melodies that reference the rhythmic matrix (the gã line of maculelê) currently used in funk.

3. A preference for synthesized sounds over sounds that evoke acoustic instruments.[27]

In December 2020, DJ Mandrake released the track BERIMBAU DA BRUXARIA, transforming the rhythmic base of Tamborzão into a melodic line played on a sampled berimbau and punctuated by 808 hits. Although berimbau samples had already appeared in some of the earliest 1990s baile funk montagens, they only became a recurring structural element with São Paulo’s mandelão — especially in bruxaria and, even more so, the ritmada subgenre.

As Peter Fryer notes in his book Rhythms of Resistance: African Musical Heritage in Brazil, although the berimbau is a Brazilian invention, it “clearly derives from various Angolan gourd-resonated single-string musical bows played with a thin cane stick.” [28] In this sense, the berimbau may be understood as the quintessential emblem of what is often seen as the “folkloric” Afro-Brazilian culture: an umbilical instrument linking Brazil to Africa, to ancestral oral traditions transmitted across the Atlantic by enslaved peoples.

The berimbau is also one of the defining symbols of Bahia, the northeastern Brazilian state that received the largest influx of African slaves in South America. Its capital, Salvador, is often described as “the largest African city outside Africa,” owing to its Black majority. Bahia is roots: the land of candomblé, of the annual maritime celebrations of the orixá Iemanjá, of Olodum’s samba-reggae and Gilberto Gil’s tropicalist cool. In Bispo’s terms, Bahia embodies the “organic” paradigm of Blackness.

“É preferível ficar na entressombra fecunda, que é só onde podem nascer as assombrações.” ― Mário de Andrade

Twentieth-century Brazilian history, however, is marked by massive internal migration from these northeastern regions — culturally and spiritually rich, but economically impoverished — toward the southeastern megacities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Rio occupies an intermediate position, retaining much of Bahia’s tropicalist sensibility while folding it into a globalized urban culture. São Paulo, by contrast, appears as its near opposite: where Bahia is organic, São Paulo is synthetic; where Bahia unfolds at a laid-down pace, São Paulo is accelerated; where Bahia is earthy, São Paulo is abstract. While Rio long functioned as Brazil’s international showcase, the country’s economic and cultural gravity has, over recent decades, shifted decisively toward São Paulo. That baile funk’s first truly paradigmshifting transformation since Tamborzão bears the sonic imprint of São Paulo is symptomatic of this broader historical drift.

SP is SF. If one follows the classic cyberpunk formula — high tech, low life — few cities fit it as precisely as São Paulo. Like the Asian megacities long associated with the genre — Hong Kong or Tokyo — São Paulo dazzles with its vertical sprawl of glass and concrete, luxury towers, endless traffic jams, biometric gates, surveillance systems, and a cashless economy in which QR codes and instant transfers have replaced the rustle of paper money. Yet in São Paulo, high technology fuses far more spectacularly with the precarious, “low-life” aspect of cyberpunk: everything runs on apps, yet people fear taking their phones out on the street; homeless people and street vendors alike request donations via Pix or accept card payments.

Still, São Paulo is a city of immigrants, and the magic of Bahia is not entirely lost there. In funk bruxaria, berimbau resurfaces, but cloned and mutated: heavily distorted, hyper-pitched. Track titles such as Berimbau Ultradimensional speak for themselves.

One of the central figures of funk bruxaria, at least since the cult track TUIN DESTRÓI NÓIA by DJ K, DJ Menor 7, DJ Nogueira, and DJ Magro, is the nóia. Derived from paranoia, nóia is a beautifully polysemic slang term. It commonly designates a drug user who has “lost it,” often through crack consumption, but it also names a broader spectrum of delirious, anxious, or bad-vibe mental states (as in, “don’t be such a nóia, man”). São Paulo is a city of nóia in all senses of the word.

Its historic center houses the infamous cracolândia, often described as the largest open-air drug scene in the world. Nóia is the inhabitant of cracolândia; nóia is also the “good citizen” clutching their pockets. Paranoia saturates the city’s technological acceleration, its street crime, its aesthetic grit, its pixo, and the militarized governance directed at the periphery.

Rio de Janeiro presents a different configuration of the same dystopia. In late 2025, a large-scale police operation in Rio’s favelas left 122 people dead — mostly young and Black — becoming the most lethal episode of state violence in recent Brazilian history. The spectacle was unmistakably sci-fi: armored vehicles, entire urban territories treated as hostile zones by the state, and drug factions responding with weaponized drones. Rio’s necropolitics tends toward visibility and excess — toward open confrontation and the theatrical assertion of sovereignty through force.

While comparable bloodshed also occurs in São Paulo — one need only recall the massacre of DZ7 — the dominant tendency there leans toward more ambient, computational forms of necropolitics.

One can think of Chinese AI-powered surveillance systems installed in favelas, predictive policing, data extraction, financial scams and low-grade permanent suspicion form part of the city’s everyday infrastructure. Cloned credit cards, hacked accounts, and digital fraud are components of an informal cyber-economy, thematized in many mandelão tracks by DJs such as Rugal or paran0ia .

Interestingly, bruxaria’s splitting of the ultra-low and ultra-high frequency registers — the 808 sub-bass and the tuin — mirrors strategies that theorist and dubstep producer Steve Goodman attributes to practices of “sonic warfare” in modern societies. Goodman describes laboratory experiments conducted during the Cold War and beyond, in which sounds below or above the threshold of conscious audibility were shown to induce panic, anger, or nervousness without any apparent cause. These experiments demonstrate how ultra-low and ultra-high frequencies modulate affect in a bodily and unconscious manner, even when they remain imperceptible to the conscious mind. Goodman further argues that while contemporary societies generate an omnipresent atmosphere of ambient dread through hostile urbanism, policing, and accelerated information ecologies, bass cultures — dub, dancehall, grime, dubstep — deliberately engage these vibrational registers in order to convert dread into collective ecstasy and, potentially, liberation. [29]

As state violence becomes increasingly cybernetic, so too do the sonic strategies of urban survival. In this sense, funk bruxaria is witchcraft in the full sense of the word: through the noise of the tuin and the reactivation of ancestral pulse, it seeks to break the spell of cybernetic possession — a contemporary continuation of what candomblé and macumba did under earlier phases of colonialism.

Crucially, however, Goodman maintains a strategic ambiguity regarding where the therapeutic use of sub-bass ends and where it begins to function as a sonic weapon. Funk bruxaria inhabits this same zone of ambiguity. It does not respond to the apocalyptic acceleration of the present by offering moments of serene transcendence, but by plunging the listener directly into the immanence of dread — into the throbbing inferno of the 808 and the piercing cry of the tuin. In this descent, the panic and nihilism of the 2020s are converted into collective rapture — at least for some; for others, like those in Paraísopolis and Heliópolis, whose windows vibrate with sound until dawn, it likely remains closer to sonic terrorism.

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REFERENCES

1. See GG Albuquerque, Counter-Tradition. Toward the Black Vanguard of Contemporary Brazil, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/43891761/
Counter_Tradition_Toward_the_Black_Vanguard_of_Contemporary_Brazil .

2. See the Glossary in Thiago Barbosa Alves de Souza, Putologia Avançada. Musicologia do Funk, 2024.

3. GG Albuquerque, A Sonic Thinking of Dirt and Noise. The Sound of Favela Funk DJs, 2024, https://radicalsoundslatinamerica.com/gg-albuquerque-a-sonic-thinking-of-dirt-andnoise/ .

4. De Souza, Putologia Avançada, 121.

5. See this kind of framing, refer to for instance Adriana Carvalho Lopes, Funk-se Quem Quiser. No batidão negro da cidade carioca, 2011.

6. Translation mine: “A maneira como se produz os sons do Funk são frequentemente ignoradas no debate público. Tudo em prol das discussões sociais, políticas e raciais.” Thiago Barbosa Alves de Souza, Putologia Avançada. Musicologia do Funk, 2024, 46.

7. See the Glossary in de Souza, Putologia Avançada.

8. Kodwo Eshun, More More Brilliant Than The Sun. Adventures In Sonic Fiction, 1998, 179.

9. Antônio Bispo dos Santos, A terra dá, a terra quer, 2023.

10. In the Ccru issue of DasQuestões, Sofia Celeste describes her writing as an “anthropophagic” devouring of accelerationism.

11. Oswald de Andrade, Anthropophagic Manifesto, In Pedro Marques (ed), The Forest & The School: where to sit at the dinner table, 2020.

12. GG Albuquerque, Counter-Tradition.

13. Renan Ribeiro Moutinho, “Bota o tambor pra tocar/geral no embalo, esse batuque é funk”. Processos afrodiaspóricos de organização sonora no funk carioca, 2020.

14. Translation mine: “Seria mais fácil, mais “natural”, ter baile de samba, baile de rock e outros tipos de música que são de fácil acesso para quem mora no Rio. Mas os discotecários optam pela raridade. De alguma forma, estamos diante de um exemplo daquilo que Oswald de Andrade chama de antropofagia: “Só me interessa o que não é meu”. […] O funk chega ao Rio e é deglutido de maneira inédita. Não existem bailes como esses em nenhum outro lugar do mundo. Alguns detalhes aparecem em outras cidades. Mas a combinação desse tipo de dança, com o tipo de roupa, com o tipo de música, com o tipo de organização das equipes de som e a atuação do DJ só acontece no mundo funk carioca.” Hermano Vianna, O Mundo Funk Carioca, 1988, Conclusion.

15. Moutinho, “Bota o tambor”.

16. Moutinho, “Bota o tambor”, 26.

17. Literally meaning “Big drum”.

18. Carlos Palombini, Do volt-mix ao tamborzão: morfologias comparadas e neurose, 2016, 37, https://www.researchgate.net/publication 304541222_Do_voltmix_ao_tamborzao_morfologias_comparadas_e_neurose .

19. For a detailed overview, see Moutinho, “Bota o tambor”.

20. Moutinho, “Bota o tambor”, 202.

21. See Thiagson, Putologia avançada, 94–97.

22. Translation mine: “Síntese não é mistura. A diferença óbvia é esta: na mistura os ingredientes perdem parte de sua estrutura, para unir-se no denominador mais baixo. Na síntese, os ingredientes são elevados a novo nível no qual desvendam aspectos antes encobertos. Mistura é resultado de processo entrópico, síntese resulta de entropia negativa. Obviamente o Brasil é país de mistura. Mas potencialmente, por salto qualitativo, é o país da síntese.” Vilém Flusser, Fenomenologia do brasileiro, 1998.

23. Fëlix Guattari, Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, 2007, 98–99.

24. Reginaldo Prandi, Ogum. caçador, agricultor, ferreiro, trabalhador, guerreiro e rei, 2010.

25. De Souza, Putologia avançada, 134–135.

26. De Souza, Putologia avançada, 123.

27 Translation mine:
“1. alta intensidade que resulta em clipping e distorção.”

2. Construção extremada no registro das alturas, ou seja, usa-se um som grave e acentuado no primeiro tempo e sons agudos nos demais tempos. Em oposição ao som grave inicial, em que não se identifica uma frequência exata, os sons agudos costumam formar melodias que fazem referência à matriz rítmica (linha gã do Maculelê) usada atualmente no funk.
3. Preferência por sons sintetizados ao invés do uso de sons que remetem à instrumentos acústicos.” De Souza, Putologia avançada, 123.

28. Peter Fryer, Rhythms of Resistance. African Musical Heritage in Brazil, 32.

29. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, 29.

David Šír is a PhD philosophy student in Brasília.