Buraka Som Sistema have a song on YouTube called Sound Of Kuduro that’s got over a million hits and growing. They’re the Portuguese group responsible for bringing the Angolan Kuduro sound to Western ears. We got an early morning chat in with Joao Barbosa aka Lil John.

Morning Joao, how are you doing?

I’m good, thanks.

Buraka is a neighbourhood in Lisbon with a rough reputation. Is it justified?

Well it’s the area where you get the cheapest houses… so I think you get the idea right? If you grew up there you develop some kind of relationship with everyone around you. The problem is the cheap rent and the people move in for a year or two and that’s not very healthy.

Is there much music made in that area?

Yeah, some dance can come from that area. In high schools there was always music but nothing fantastic.

What’s your background?

I’m 100% from Lisbon but growing up next to Angolan people, they were my friends and obviously you go to lunch with their families and you stumble across all their culture. You know London, like those neighbourhoods like Brixton where all the kids, even if they’re not Jamaican, grow up knowing the Jamaican soundsystems.

How does your music differ from the music made in Angola?

Well everything is electronic because Kuduro was born as a reaction to traditional music. From the beginning it was kids trying to make techno and house music. Like in Lisbon we’re influenced by a lot of music that comes from London and in Angola they’re more influenced by music that comes from the United States and South America. I remember the first drum and bass night that opened in Lisbon in ’97. And now obviously dubstep has started, so we kind of follow all those changes and we relate to that as much as African music or rock or hip hop.

Kuduro MCing sounds very aggressive. Are the songs angry?

One of the big ideas behind Kuduro music is to treat every instrument and every element of the song as percussion. Even the voice. It’s like in lyrical hip hop where people are interested in the words or other hip hop where people are trying to do funny stuff with their voices. Kuduro relates more to that. If you don’t understand a couple of words in the chorus then it doesn’t really matter. It’s aggressive in a way but it’s also a lot of fun. We try to take about social themes in different ways in our music.

Is there a downtempo version of Kuduro?

There’s a version of it that’s exactly half-tempo at 70bpm. It’s the moment of the night where you grab your lady. But she does all the work you don’t have to..

Sweeeeet.

Ha ha. When it goes downtempo, the guy just stands there and the lady does the rest.

On your Hollertronix EP you did stuff with Lil Wayne, Missy Elliot and Skream, how do you choose which artists’ music to work with?

People suggested Lil Wayne but the rest is just stuff we’re listening to. Some stuff wouldn’t make sense to try but if the beats can fit Kuduro and we really like the vibe it works.

Do you think you’ll do more with Znobia again after the success of the Sound of Kuduro?

Definitely yeah. We started from a sample that he gave us and then we developed the beats from there.

Black Diamond took a couple of years to make, was it a particularly hard album to produce?

Not really. We like to treat music seriously. For us doing an album means a lot of thinking and trying to figure out what we want to do. We talk about music a lot before we sit down to produce it. Every song came from a conversation. We like to have a big picture before we start doing it.

Do kids in Lisbon do the Kuduro dance?

A little bit. Some second generation Angolan kids who go to high school and do it.

And what about you?

We bring dancers to the show, not us.

Buraka Som Sistema play Twisted Pepper on December 11.

Read our Bodytonic in Angola piece.

Check out this live Buraka Som Sistema performance below.