Maga Bo's world-rattling beats

I think I might have posted something, months ago, about Maga Bo, Brazilian-based DJ linked to DJ Rupture and Filastine...I really liked his album Quilombo do Futuro (roughly, "Future by the Kilo"? I don't know.) Anyway, I reviewed the record for Blurt and forgot about it, and it just turned up on the site yesterday.

Maga Bo
Quilombo do Futuro
(Post World Industries)


Maga Bo, the American-born, Brazilian-based DJ, brings together a polyglot mash of rhythms, instruments and ethnic styles into the future, marrying samba beats to booming sub bass, gritty urban raps to hand-fashioned instrumentation. A crew of mostly Afro-Brazilian but also Caribbean-via-Brooklynite collaborators turn up the verbal heat, while Maga Bo stages a knife fight of cross-cutting, slashing rhythms.

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Maga Bo

Quilombo do Futuro landed in my inbox a few weeks ago...a bit outside my normal listening patterns, but pretty cool nonetheless. It reminds me most of Buraka Son Sistema, which is to say it has really fantastic beats that get their heat both from traditional hand-played percussion and electronics. It's hard to pin down exactly what style Brazilian/American DJ Maga Bo favors, let alone what country, but you can hear elements of dance/funk/Afro-Caribbean/dancehall etc.

NYT had an enthusiastic review a few days ago:

Maga Bo

Hand-played percussion and hard-nosed voices are the rocket fuel for Maga Bo’s “Quilombo do Futuro” (Post World Industries), a cultural manifesto riding on rhythm. Make that rhythms. Maga Bo, a widely traveled American D.J. and producer who relocated to Rio de Janeiro in 1999, uses kinetic Afro-Brazilian beats as the album’s foundation and superstructure. But his tracks also mix in drum-machine sounds, stray ricocheting electronics, Brazilian guitars and glimmers of soundsystem bass music like Jamaican dancehall as well as Brazilian baile funk. Atop them — rapping, chanting and singing their own lyrics — are voices that can keep pace with the syncopations or sail above them. In Portuguese and occasionally English, Maga Bo’s collaborators often praise culture as survival mechanism and resistance tactic, while the beats constantly prove them right.

There's a lot more information about Maga Bo and his music here.