Rio de Janeiro-born producer DJ Ramon Sucesso has evangelized experimental music fans around the world to baile funk with frenetic viral videos in which he pounds away at MIDI pads and distorts turntable scratches into banshee wails. Each Sucesso video has a signature visual touch: When the bass hits, the camera vibrates in an uncontrollable fit, almost like you’re smack dab inside the pounding heart of a subwoofer. There is no baile funk without the raucous underground bailes that gave birth to the sound, and these gonzo clips capture the genre’s aliveness better than any conventional album could.
The 21-year-old DJ’s official catalog is pretty slim. He has produced a few more straightforward funk tracks, including on his fairly subdued collaborative EP Contenção with vocalist 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 creating sounds from scratch, but manipulating existing sounds until they become new. His new 12-inch Sexta dos Crias—a dubplate mix with two 15-minute cutting and chopping frenzies on either side—highlights not just the gymnastic dexterity of Sucesso’s fingers, but the possibilities of the DJ controller as an instrument unto itself.
“Sexta dos Crias” is the slightly more restrained half, but it’s still wildly unpredictable, full of cartoonish Fruity Loops effects, jagged samples, and kick 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 he’s mashing buttons made of slime. Voices are chopped into staccato chants while he drags the tempo knob up and down on his controller, manipulating the speed of the beat and your body like a gleeful puppetmaster. Sucesso’s own trigger-happy style is influenced by Brazilian mixmasters like DJ Zullu, who bring turntablist Olympics into the era of MIDI pads and Serato controllers.
The B-side—“Distorcendo a Realidade,” which literally translates to “Distorting Reality”—is a blur of pure sensation. Successo throws you off balance, always impishly toying with the pitch or introducing a chaotic new element into the mix—wailing horns, chiptune blasts, and pounding bass—until sounds are felt more than heard. Distorted voices laced with a dubby tinge of echo chatter over one another, competing for your attention. Words are reduced to percussive syllables, as Sucesso twists guttural voices into beatboxers in his distorted orchestra. When he spins the turntable, it doesn’t sound like a scratch, but a squeal or even a scream, as tracks dissolve one to another with a forceful squeegee wipe.
