Rio de Janeiro-born producer DJ Ramon Sucesso has been evangelizing experimental music fans around the world to baile funk with frantic viral videos in which he slams MIDI pads and distorts turntable scratches into banshee chants. Every Sucesso video has a signature visual touch: When the bass hits, the camera vibrates with an uncontrollable fit, almost like hitting the heart of a subwoofer. There's no baile funk without the extreme underground bailes that spawned the sound, and these gonzo clips capture the vitality of the genre better than any conventional album.
The 21-year-old DJ's official catalog is pretty slim. He's produced a few more simple funk tracks, including on his fairly restrained collaborative EP Contenção with a singer MC Torugo, which mixes Latin trap beats with sparse conga drums. As evidenced by the success of his videos, Successo's real strength is not in creating sounds from scratch, but in manipulating existing sounds into new ones. His new 12 inch Sexta dos Crias—a dubplate mix with two frenetic 15-minute cuts and cuts on either side—highlights not only Sucesso's finger-gymnastic prowess, but also the DJ controller's capabilities as an instrument in its own right.
“Sexta dos Crias” is the slightly more restrained half, but it's still extremely unpredictable, full of cartoonish Fruity Loops, jagged samples and drums that chirp like a chorus of frogs. One of Successo's trademarks is the “beat bolha” or “bubble beat”, a squishy drum effect that sounds like it's mashing buttons out of mud. The vocals break into staccato chants as he drags the tempo knob up and down on his controller, manipulating the tempo speed and your body like a happy puppeteer. Sucesso's trigger-happy style is influenced by Brazilian mixmasters such as DJ Zullubringing the turntable olympics into the era of MIDI pads and Serato controllers.
The B-side – “Distorcendo a Realidade”, which literally translates to “Distortion of Reality” – is a blur of pure sensation. Successo throws you off balance, always messing with the pitch or introducing a chaotic new element into the mix – wailing horns, chiptune blasts and pounding bass – until the sounds are more felt than heard. Distorted voices with an uneven timbre of chatter on top of each other, competing for your attention. Words are reduced to percussive syllables as Sucheso twists guttural voices into beatboxers in his distorted orchestra. When the turntable spins, it doesn't sound like a scratch, but a screech or even a scream, as the tracks break into each other with a loud squeegee.