Buraka Som Sistema Announces Final N.A. Tour, Calls Ten-Year Run a ‘Beautiful Accident’
Ten years ago, four friends from Lisbon, Portugal, got together in a studio to record some songs, just for fun. They took an outdated sound of their upbringing and smashed it up against modern UK breakbeats. One of those tracks started getting heavy rotation on local radio waves, then it spread throughout their region, then the continent, then the world.
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Before they knew it, they were traveling as far as Japan and the United States, sharing their unique blend of kuduro, zouk, breakbeat, dub, and every flavor they could fit into a swirl of electronic soft-serve so delicious, it kept them working feverishly for 10 years straight.
“It was like a beautiful accident,” says Buraka Som Sistema founding member João Barbosa. “The whole thing was like a moving train that never really stopped. We’ve never had the time to (say) ‘okay, so let’s think about what’s happening,’ or ‘let’s stop the train, make a couple of decisions, and jump back on it with a new direction.’”
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Now, however, the beloved musical pioneers are hanging up their hats. The band put Lisbon on the map and helped open the door for a world of aspiring artists too far from New York City to ever dream of world domination. Buraka is giving its fans one last tour, which includes three North American dates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City April 7, 8, and 9 respectively, all at once celebrating the band’s decade of surprise success and it’s inevitable bittersweet cessation.
“We’ve been weighing it out every day for the last 10 years with the same priority,” Barbosa says. “The band takes so much of our time, from touring to making songs to making the shows ready. It’s a lot to focus on, and it’s basically not leaving us with the right amount of time to be able to just do other stuff, either create a family or do a solo project or a label, whatever everyone is up to or wants to do.”
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Up until this point, it’s been a raging waterfall of creativity and inspiration, but when the last tour calmed down and time came to start a new album, Barbosa said the spirit just isn’t in them.
“There wasn’t a clear idea of (what to do),” he says. “It kind of made us feel that maybe the music that we were going to be creating or putting together wasn’t going to be as essential as everything we’ve done so far. We decided maybe this breathing space will give us inspiration to come back and do something new, or to come back as a different project. It’s good to pursue other things in entertainment as well, from radio shows to tv shows to dance classes. There’s so many things we can use to spread our message.”
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For an accidental band, Buraka Som Sistema has had a damn fine run. It all started when Barbosa and his buddy Rui Pité, who worked together in a collective called the Cool Train Crew, got together with frequent vocal collaborator Kalaf Ângelo and the likeminded Andro Carvalho to create a night of experimental dance merging the sounds of Angola and Cape Verde with modern beats coming from the UK and abroad.
They performed their strange edits and remixes with a lot of hype, dancing, and showmanship as part of a monthly residency at a local Lisbon club. They named the night after the district of Buraca from which they hailed and tagged on Sound System as a joke (LCD Soundsystem was pretty big at the time). They translated it poorly, and boom, they had a hit.
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“The whole thing sort of took off from people that night enjoying what we were doing,” Barbosa remembers. “We really felt like we were connecting with everyone, and then the club shut down six months after.”
The friends felt they had something special in their hands, so they recorded the sound and released an EP, 2006’s From Buraka to the World. The tracks from that EP started getting play on local radio, seemingly in spite of but probably directly because of how unique and fresh the formula sounded.
“We were not growing up with the idea that we could have a worldwide impact with anything,” Barbosa says. “It wasn’t even a possibility (in our minds), because none of our friends were doing it. Just the fact of being able to play our first show at Fabric in London in 2007, a club we knew everything about, it was obviously a really special moment for us.”
As the band continued to grow, so did its sound, constantly pushing to discover, fuse, and incorporate new sounds, rhythms, and textures from around the world.
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“It’s always been about adding diversity to music,” he says. “The fact that 98 percent of music consumed comes from three cities in the world, and the fact that there’s so much more out there, and the fact that what’s out there isn’t only traditional music and world music and some guy playing a coconut shaped guitar under a palm tree. Just realizing the fact that a city like Angola or Johannesburg, those cities are super urban and super updated in terms of everything, and kids have computers and have access to make beats that come from a different place in their hearts and their mind than everything else that’s being made right now.”
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The first generation of producers who may have been 12 listening to Buraka are now 22. These kids are creating their own hot new styles and sit poised to take the world by storm in their own right. Part of this whole hiatus thing is that Buraka Som Sistema would rather step aside and make room for those kids to get their shine. Toward that goal, the band has announced that it’s last show ever in Lisbon is actually going to be the first edition of the band’s own music festival. In a sense, Buraka Som Sistema is going back to its roots, not as a band, but as a musical event.
“The whole idea is that we start a festival that has exactly the same spirit as the band,” Barbosa says, “make a Buraka day in Lisbon.”
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Until then, the group just wants to give one more big hurrah to the audiences that have always made them feel the most at home.
“I’m still just playing shows,” Barbosa says. “I’m not really thinking about that at all, which is weird. It’s like when someone in your family dies. It takes a while for you to actually realize it or embrace it, to realize that it’s all happening that way. So we’re still, it’s like, I’m still playing.”
