When traditional measures to fight the mosquito-borne Zika virus in Brazil proved unsuccessful, the country eventually turned to bioengineered mosquitos in order to crowd out the fatal virus’ rapidly spawning host lineage. The debut EP from Brazilian producer Superfície prominently features descendants of these cyborgian arthropods: its artwork depicts a digitally-rendered mosquito, and their buzzing sound effects appear directly on three of the four tracks. On Hélices, the producer weaves a fantastic science-fiction narrative that intertwines digital entomology with Afro-Brazilian baile funk rhythms.
In the process, Superfície draws inspiration from his native country, particularly the history of the indigenous Guaraní people, who the government of Brazil didn’t formally recognize as human beings until 1988. (And leaders say their genocide continues, along with their struggles against land dispossession and horrible youth suicide rates.) With that, Superfície also takes on technologized visions of the future and capitalism’s thirst for ecological devastation in the global south. The role of technology is decidedly ambivalent on Helíces, which simultaneously valorizes the potentialities of tech for resistance and highlights the ways it will reproduce existing relationships of domination.
While it’s impossible to grasp the whole backstory by just listening to this instrumental release, the EP’s compositional approach conveys a similar form of technological entanglement. This is evident in its approach to the baile funk rhythm, which, like most diasporic rhythms, has gone through multiple gene mutations in its lifetime. Here, it’s re-engineered through a process of syncopation that splices together its past, present, and imagined future. Initially inspired by Miami bass and freestyle records, the baile funk beat has melded at various points with Rocky horn samples, beatboxing, and a Diplo cooptation; these days, it finds itself commandeered by frolicking teen-boys like MC Pikachu and MC Brinquedo.
Hélices jams on the baile funk rhythm like a contagious, viral riff, stringing and restringing it through zones of pleasure and dread. “Febre Do Vale” subjects a slow march to this microbe-morphing approach, while “Dengue Drums” transmutes it into a kind of ecstatic restlessness. A fluid sound design, in-between musical phrasing and spurts of noise, glues it all together.
Like the swarming bioengineered insects let loose throughout Brazil, the baile funk rhythm moves through the world guided by these processes of emergence and network-oriented models of distribution. On the EP, it infects and is reciprocally infected by sounds from a disparate range of sources, enmeshed with ambient music motifs, samples of traditional percussion instruments, and a motif of Guaraní music on the track “Cerol.” The earworming, precise sound-forms on this release thus convey feelings of dispersion. The producer references another mosquito-borne illness on “Dengue Drums,” a track characterized by a gliding sense of polyrhythmic uncoiling. The EP’s accompanying remixes by Venezuelan-American producer umurmurum and Club Chai co-founder foozool further extend the contagion of the sounds at hand, reframing them in more straightforwardly dancefloor-friendly and eerily droning contexts, respectively.
In his theoretical writings, the Afrofuturist critic Kodwo Eshun has praised Black diasporic musics that use sonic technologies to break with the past and synthesize new ways of thinking about and feeling the future. We can see Superfície making related moves here. It’s unclear what kind of future the EP fights for exactly, but its urgency rages.