Written on the run between bank heists and safe houses, Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual for the Urban Guerrilla is a guide to revolution by a man who deeply believed that violence was the answer. The politician-turned-enemy of the state considered terrorism a tool at the hands of the oppressed, a way for the working class to take their marginal status and brandish it like a machine gun. For all the military’s supposed “intelligence,” Marighella knew that the favelas were a blindspot for Brazil’s dictatorship—physically neighboring its seats of power but far beyond its assumed authority. In a chapter titled “The War of Nerves,” Marighella outlines how to play into the regime’s paranoia by “letting false plans fall into the hands of the police to divert their attention; planting rumors to make the government uneasy… forcing them into demoralizing explanations and justifications in the very communication media they wish to maintain under censorship.”
DJ K’s latest record opens with a sampled threat courtesy of Marighella. “We’ll respond with an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” the revolutionary warns the listener: “The struggle has already begun.” Few are as talented at waging a war of nerves as the São Paulo producer. The artist born Kaique Vieira is a star of bruxaria, a style of Brazilian funk that plays up (and into) the hysteria of the favelas as a zone of nightmares. His 2023 debut PANICO NO SUBMUNDO introduced the musician as the genre’s premier master of horror by mixing slasher movie effects with the warning signs of a rapidly unfolding public disaster. On songs like “Erva Venenos” and “Isso Não é Um Teste,” he interwove samples of evil laughter with emergency broadcasts, pitching funk’s signature high end to a chorus of car alarms and air-raid sirens. With his latest, Radio Libertadora!, DJ K aims to project his party-starting, killer-clown aesthetic onto the chaos of contemporary Brazil. The result is a dance record that wears its political themes like a Halloween costume—great for cheap, campy thrills but falling short of striking any deeper, never mind radical, notes of terror.
If Marighella’s mission was to violently overthrow the government, DJ K settles for the much more manageable task of fucking shit up. Drawing from his experience headlining local mandela parties, DJ K is a mischievous presence behind the decks, as likely to cater to the roars of a packed dancefloor as to blindside his listener with sudden, antagonistic blasts of noise. Unlike the fully cohesive, darksided world-building of PANICO, Radio Libertadora! plays like a clutch of reliably crowd-tested bangers. In place of shadowy jump scares, many songs barrel into action, leaving you little time to catch your breath. “PSY VEM FAZER NENEM” leans hard into funk’s electro DNA, allowing the beat to surge and stutter before cresting into a frenzy of helium-pitched whistling. The constantly shape-shifting “ELA PEGA O BRINQUEDO NA MÃO” cycles through presets from chintzy horns to witchy synth melodies, spanning from cheesiness into jarring discordance. “MEGA SUICIDIO AUDITIVO” is probably the record’s most overwhelming moment of chaos, wielding absolutely seismic blast beats to open up a treble-heavy, tinnitus-inducing portal to Hell. As exciting as these moments can be, DJ K never chases a mood for longer than a song, so they explode in isolation rather than truly reverberate over the course of the album.
