Nathan Evans' UK garage and club music column covers the latest songs, remixes, bootlegs, mixes and albums that capture his attention. This edition dives into the world of Brazilian garage, and the label that is helping the style to snowball in the country’s major cities.

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Cover Image Credit: João Medeiros

Speedtest Rave is Showing Brazilian Clubs the UK Sound, Whether They Like It or Not

It should be common knowledge by now that Brazil is producing the most fascinating club music in the world right now, at a rate of knots. The Baile funk (or just ‘funk’ to the locals) scenes in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte has the world’s attention, but that is scratching the surface of endless experimentation of a rhythm that has caught the ear of the Global North. It’s resulted in UK producers like Frazer Ray and Will Hofbauer dipping their toes into the style in their own, polished and DJ-friendly way. But the UK-Brazil club music connection is going both ways.

What lies on the other side of the connection is Brazilian garage, which is making its own in-roads and having Brazilian dance culture bolted onto its the 2step and 4x4 frame, Mad Max-style. This growing legion of Brazilian artists don’t all mesh into a concrete sound like the Japanese scene does, but their culture and attitudes all naturally run through into their music. There’s chipmunk 2step refixes of worldwide anthems, teen pop and Latin pop stars. There’s those with a more internet-pilled approach, negating to add polish and distributing the core idea in all its rousing roughness. Lo-fi funk MC samples are diced up in the same way Tuff Jam would have if they spoke Portuguese, making for choppier rhythm patterns. On the other end of the scale, dark garage is meshed with grimier MCing or deadpan rapping that is closer to speaking voice and common in Brazilian funk.

At the heart of this shift is Speedtest Rave, a label founded by Minas Gerais producer Chediak as a label for producers and DJs who discovered electronic music through an internet lens to experiment with the club sounds of Brazil, the UK and the US all at once. Initially quite focused on drum & bass, Speedtest has a growing roster that includes the cooky baile funk of DJ RaMeMes and Brazilian grime technician Anticonstantino, and with producers like Crosstalk, TUI and Quest, there’s a growing influence of UK garage within the nation-spanning label. But despite their cohesive sonic palette, there’s simply no one sound that can be seen as dominant - the label’s most popular song on soundcloud is a hard rock tune with Blade-era acid synths, sweeping funk vocals and a juke breakdown. Nothing is off the table or the plates.

Listening through their catalogue, you’ll get a feel for their influences quickly. Taleko’s ebullient flip of Ludmilla, Dedeco’s rapid and sing-songy ‘Time 2 Make U Sweat’ and Crosstalk’s rifling ‘Smb’ carry infatuations with Ed Banger, PC Music and Skrillex respectively - all three of which defined by scruffy shards of hysteric sound design that reflect a lifetime spent consumed by the internet.

Two of Speedtest Rave’s releases last year made it into my Top 100 Garage Tunes of 2023 list at #14 and #11 - “MAMADA DUB” by Crosstalk and “VIDA LOKA DUB” by label founder Chediak, respectively. As I learn from conversations with both producers, Speedtest is reintroducing the crowds in the unthinkably expansive country to UK club sounds and evolving on them with a certain sabor.

To understand the Brazilian garage and Speedtest Rave phenomenon, the first place to go is to the early 2000s, when Brazil first engaged with UK club sounds. “Drum & bass had a big boom here in Brazil some 20 years ago,” Crosstalk tells me over Zoom. Brazil’s love affair with D&B resulted in Sambass, a genre which blended the style with jazzy Samba, which tore up Fifa Street soundtracks of the time and spawned hits like the eternal “LK (Carolina Carol Bela)” by DJ Marky, XRS & Stamina MC. “It was huge here in 2000-2006, and then kind of died a little,” says Chediak, who was unaware of it when he originally started the label. With D&B long gone, Brazil’s mainstream electronic music scene today is made up of baile funk as well as tech house and melodic techno, but Chediak’s introduction to electronic music was far removed from that.

“‘Face to Face’ by Daft Punk, that was my favourite song as a child,” he says. Iconic for its collaboration with garage house eccentric Todd Edwards, ‘Face to Face’ was Chediak’s gateway into the New Jersey artist’s work. “My whole style of chopping things was learned from overly obsessing with every detail from his music as a child,” he explains. What’s interesting is that when Chediak and Crosstalk trace back their listening, they both realise that they had been listening to UK garage without yet knowing what the genre was.

The eureka moment that made them both truly discover UK garage as its own style came from a source that the UK’s club underground has had a troubled history with. “I don't think you're gonna like my answer,” Chediak giggles as he preempts, “but the first 2step thing I heard was the Skrillex track called ‘Leaving’.” A love letter to Burial in many ways, Skrillex’s prominence as an international sensation meant that “Leaving” was many people’s first introduction to 2step rhythm. Chediak continues, “I asked my best friend Maffalda [a São Paulo producer who has worked with Charli XCX, Anitta, Pabllo Vittar and more], ‘what's this drum pattern?’ I liked it so much but I didn't know it was a UK thing, I just thought it was house music. [Maffalda] sent me Burial and my brain exploded.” (SIDE NOTE: Chediak and Crosstalk recently released a collaborative four-tracker which see them Questing for Fire, so to speak)

Without meeting yet, Chediak and Crosstalk began producing in large part because of Skrillex - making mashups on the Sony Vegas video editing software before graduating to music making software - before the two would meet and bond over their shared love of the 2011 film Tron: Legacy, which was soundtracked by Daft Punk. “Even though it's kind of a bad movie, I love that movie,” Crosstalk laughs. “The visuals, especially for 2011, were just fucking insane.”

As almost a precursor to Speedtest Rave in retrospect, Chediak formed a multimedia collective called Lost Boys from 2018 to 2022, which included Crosstalk, released music as a label and threw parties. “I always liked to do collaborative projects with many artists, ever since I began,” Chediak explains. “I came from an online community background. I did YouTube stuff, I had a Minecraft channel and made servers and stuff. I really love creating together.” For Crosstalk, the collective had a profound effect on his production and artist movements. “Lost Boys was a really big school to learn about everything about releasing your own project and how you communicate that,” he says. “Especially during COVID, where we spent every day speaking to each other and working together. So when [I started releasing under Crosstalk], I had a good notion of what I had to do.”

However, for Chediak, he encountered a rare issue - Lost Boys left him stuck because there weren't any boundaries. “I was really digging fusing drum & bass and baile funk,” he takes me back to where he was in 2022. “The idea of Speedtest as a label to release this type of music was really strong to me at the time.” Moving away from Lost Boys meant focusing purely on this new vision: a label and party for, in Chediak’s words, “electronic music that you could put in like in a racing game or something similar”, with an aesthetic that draws from films like Hackers and, of course, Tron: Legacy. “But I didn't want it to be totally nostalgic for Y2K,” Chediak adds. “I wanted it to be high definition.”

One facet that wasn’t lost in the move was the friendship between every participant of the label. Every producer involved musically with the Lost Boys transitioned to Speedtest Rave, and each were already venturing into their own corner of dance music as though they were different personalities in a video game character selection screen. “DJ Lukinhas was producing EDM-ish future bass, Chediak was making a dubstep/future bass kind of sound and DJ Carlozs was making Jersey club… it’s funny because we were already kind of doing everything with lots of different influences back then,” Crosstalk remarks.

Although Chediak adopted the philosophy of strength in numbers, the process of bringing UK sounds to Brazilian clubs wasn’t without resistance. “I started playing in 2016,” Chediak begins. “Since day one, I [would] always play drum & bass, garage and stuff. I've been working with these styles for years and there was no scene around this in Brazil.” He would normally play 1-3 times a year, but was continually met with audience disapproval and, depending on where he played, they let him know about it. “I've been booed off stage a couple times. I’ve had sound technicians killing my sound because of what I was playing. So I didn't like DJing that much, I felt like I didn’t fit in.”

During the 2020 pandemic, TikTok helped drum & bass and jungle reach more global audiences than ever, and the effects could be seen as Chediak realised a dormant scene was finally awoken. “Speedtest started right after [the pandemic]. It was the first party that brought back this idea of playing drum & bass, jungle and stuff [in Brazil]. I think that sparked the interest of a newer audience, people that didn't know that Brazil had a drum and bass moment in the early 2000s.”

The first Speedtest Rave live event, featuring Chediak, Crosstalk (at the time known as Rassi), ANTCONSTANTINO, DJ RaMeMes and more, marked a cementation that their mission could work, and the evidence was all recorded. “I think people saw what I was trying to do, spreading this type of sound. And then really quickly, I started to get booked more because people wanted that sound at their events.” In 2022, he played 12 gigs. Last year, he played 42. “It was a huge jump for me, I was completely exhausted by the end of the year, but it was unbelievable. It was really the Speedtest project that turned things around for me, you know?”

Brazilian garage is still “pretty niche” in Crosstalk’s words (“I can literally count all of the producers making it in two hands”), but it has garnered attention in the nation when merged with Brazilian pop: Crosstalk cites Ruadois’ “fml” as an example. While garage may be making its clandestine introduction to Brazil now, one begins to wonder if it has staying power in Brazilian clubs, or will it end up a product of the time like Sambass? It seems that Speedtest is already acutely thinking about this.

“Doing UK garage here in Brazil today, we’ve got to know we're doing something that people aren't used to here in Brazil,” he states. “Not saying they aren't going to like it, but [we think about] how do you do it? How do you blend that in with other styles? It's really about presenting a lot of different and weird shit, but always having things that take you back home,” he continues. “It could be a song with a funk vocal in a garage track, for example. That’s kind of our goal, to make it popular by speaking the same language as the crowd.”

It’s why more than anything, Speedtest’s tracks and events are purposefully overwhelming with stimuli and anchored by baile funk. “I really insisted on baile funk being a part of every single thing we do at Speedtest, so there’s such a clash of things, so many different sounds colliding at the same time, when you're at this party that it becomes comforting, you know?” Chediak says. “It's this sensory overload in the best way possible. If you don't like what's playing now, maybe in 30 seconds you will hear the best song you’ve ever heard. I’ve seen people going crazy in the flip of a moment and singing in our raves. The music we’ve been making is to evoke that reaction.” In fact, it seems to be working so well that even those from the 2000s drum & bass era are tuning in and sharing the dancefloor of Speedtest events with new, younger listeners who may not know the history. “We’re sort of giving a shelter to those old people who don't have parties to go to anymore, but also we're showing it to new people,” as Chediak puts it.

Chediak cites Mamba Negra, one of the largest and most inclusive techno parties for LGBTQ+ clubbers, as a north star when it comes to the organisation of live events, and is making headway in matching their scale. “Last year, I was asked to do the Speedtest stage at the Coala Festival, which is a huge festival here in Brazil,” he recalls. “We had legendary artists there with a small Speedtest Stage at the Latin America Memorial.” However, Chediak’s true aspirations aren’t to play higher up on a festival lineup, but down on the streets for everyone to enjoy. “My main goal is to do street parties. I want everyone to hear this. It doesn't make much sense to me to pick all these elements from music that are being made in the favelas by people who face a lot of difficulties to make their art, and then present it through a paywall. We as a music community should be taking the streets and showing every type of people we're producing.”

As much as Speedtest is importing UK styles to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and more, the exchange is mutual. Many UK, European and US artists are pairing funk rhythms and MC vocal samples with their much cleaner, DJ-friendly structures without knowing the native tongue. I used the opportunity to ask what Brazilian producers think of this. “That's a topic that I always talk about with my friends,” Crosstalk reveals. “When people from the outside try to produce funk, you can instantly hear that they don’t know what the lyrics are saying.” 

Overseas producers are mashing up funk vocals in a way that Crosstalk says he could have never done because he hears the vocals are strings of words and not just sounds. “They’ll chop up a part of the sample where they say ‘dick’ or ‘sex’. We would never sample and chop like that,” he laughs without malice, before stating that there are a few exceptions to the rule such as HAMDI’s speaker-annihilating “Skanka”. “But I will be really honest, I think that was kind of luck when choosing that sample,” he laughs again. Chediak puts it diplomatically:  “When people from other countries try to replicate the sound, we don't need to read where someone is from, we can just listen to the song and know if they’re Brazilian. But I really like to see when someone tries to make our style of music.”

A few short years after Speedtest’s founding, Crosstalk and Chediak both see that the label has already created change in Brazil. “When you stop to look at the scene that's happening, there's a lot of people listening to it here, people who didn't know they actually liked this sound so much,” Crosstalk says. “And now they are figuring out what it is.” He goes on to talk about a demo that they received from a local producer which he says could have never been conceived without Speedtest. “Doing all of this and seeing it come back with people wanting to produce it too… we're certainly not the only ones doing it but I know we have a platform, and it's pretty cool to be in this position.”

As for the future of Speedtest, Chediak launches into a stereotypical ad read voice: “We here at Speedtest labs have been experimenting with Voçe Mix [a retro style of Brazilian funk which is closer to its Miami Bass roots] fused with garage and hardcore!” Other ideas include a comic series featuring the misadventures of their poster mascot, more syncs for video games just like they did with his and Swami Sound’s track “Refuse” in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, and generally keeping the label open to experimentation. What he does know is, despite an international reputation, Speedtest Rave is going to keep supporting artists from the homeland. “The UK has, like, 1 trillion labels for electronic music, but Brazil doesn't have many here. Most of the music we make couldn’t be released on another label. I like that Speedtest is a place for producers to show the world what they’ve been doing.”

Illegal Shipment - Running Fugitive

When I interviewed BlueDollarBillz last year, the YouTube curator and community figurehead mentioned that “there will definitely be more releases coming in the future.” Now, BDB is fully embarking on a record label, sliding across the table its first EP courtesy of duo Illegal Shipment, one of the most vivid and on-edge dark garage EPs in a long time.

Running Fugitive steps out with a frost-bitten atmosphere made from opaque, echoing chords, and only descends further as it rides along. The opening track “Police Raid” starts with an anxious ticking, before the beat doesn’t so much climax as it pokes its head from a side alley and walks briskly, head constantly turning as the sounds of police sirens swell.

Every morsel of this EP is soaked in tar and there’s no light peeking through, not even for Christmas. Even when the opening percussion starts off fleet-footed, like on back-to-back tracks “The Seconds Pass By” and “Bus Route”, Illegal Shipment adds in atmosphere like a set of brick walls to smash through, before slinging in a tumbling bass. Atmosphere is also where the sweetness of the project comes from, filtered by the duo to sound like the swooping and ducking of a high-speed tuner car cutting through ring road traffic. Even in these moments, you never escape the feeling of trepidation, of not knowing where the danger lurks.

“Glue Bag” reveals that danger in the form of viscous, serrated bass that you could hear on 1985 Music. And on this closing track, Illegal Shipment hold you under the fire for nearly seven minutes, cashing in what the EP was building up to and more. And that’s not even to mention the pummelling breaks remix by coldsweat on the tail end.

Mix of the Month: FInn - Jungle House - Bullet Time

Manchester’s Finn McCorry is a deep-sea explorer of club music, scouting out every odd-looking crevice and bringing it to the surface. His label 2 B REAL has reissued classic Jersey club that was once thought to be lost to history, and his NTS show Sunday Club showcases this with a seemingly infinite trove of house and garage charmed with disco and soul. That amount of digging comes with an equal of idea generation around this music and how it interacts through dance history.

Enter “Jungle House”, a single-sided cassette mix that slows down garage in a similar way to Littlefoot’s UKG Chopped N Screwed Minimix. But where Littlefoot's mix brings two disparate worlds together in an effort to spring new ideas, Finn is connecting historical scenes in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. By pumping the breaks on speed garage down to a house music tempo, he reveals the genre’s roots in jungle.

On “Jungle House", the speed garage rhythm is hulking and the Reese bass sprays out in thicker doses, enveloping the track like a jungle breakdown rather than being neatly surrounded by garage drums. Some of the drum fills start to sound like the intro to an island-themed pop song by Peter Andre, but once you get past that, you become aware of how Finn’stempo changes stretch the audio and fray its fidelity. The robotic speedy g vocals sound even more sluggish and druggy and after a while of focusing in on the mix, it starts to feel like you’re slowing down the world around you.

I’d describe the mix more on a sonic front, but I’d be stepping on the toes of Finn’s own description on his thought-provoking Substack. As a bonus round, Side B reverses the premise with a different genre: coiling up Sheffield bassline house into a hardgroove-like mix that, in Finn’s own words, is “emphasising the Happy Hardcore influence on Sheffield’s early Bassline scene”.

Swami Sound - Hope it Stays (Kaisui Remix)

Swami Sound’s newly-released deluxe edition of his 2023 album Back in the Day comes with a bonus cut from himself and half a dozen new remixes, including a long-teased one with Canterbury producer Kaisui.

Kaisui’s sound is, in a word, economical. Plinky and taut, his edits and remixes make the most out of the thinnest, lightest off-beat organ and piano stabs, which normally sit as late on the beat as is physically possible. In being so minimal, he has hit upon a production style that paradoxically is hard to mistake for anyone else.

His remix of Swami Sound’s already fidgety “Hope It Stays” - Back in the Day’s best cut - does more of the same. Deconstructing it to tiny fragments and letting himself stitch it together in little tatters across the track, Kaisui upends the track from a daydream to a body-shaker for the motive, replete with squidged synths and flecks of beckoning new-age flute.

Wilfy D & K-LONE - ON the Down Low

From the opening harp and sparkle combo, it’s clear that “On the Down Low” has been transported directly from the Twice As Nice era. Bristol’s Wilfy D is a purveyor of R&G - garage with the silkiness of 90s R&B - and together with Wisdom Teeth co-founder K-LONE, they create a syrupy R&B narcotic with pleading androgynous vocals and galloping organ. In a fair and just world, Erika de Casier would hop on a remix and make this a duet.