Principe Discos: How black DJs from the Lisbon suburbs made it the hottest record label in Europe | Dance music

IIt was just after 11:30pm on a Friday in early March, and the air at Lux Frágil was already thick with excitement. Groups of people stream down the stairs of the Lisbon Club, past a giant disco ball, and local DJ and producer Xexa dazzles the crowd with a live set of tracks. Soon, the disco downstairs will be filled with sweaty dancers of scene heroes DJ Marvox, DJ Nervoso, and Dariovox, their bodies colliding with the pulse-racing batidas.

Come the early hours of Saturday morning, you’ll find the upstairs abuzz with details, as partygoers flock to the terrace overlooking the Tejo River, where they toast the 15th birthday of Príncipe, the game-changing Portuguese dance music label, which took over the world-famous nightclub for the first time.

“There were people having fun everywhere — white people, black people, people who were closer to the artists, people who didn’t know the artists,” Xexa says after the event. “It was nice to see everyone coming for that reason.”

Fifteen years ago, when Lisbon’s dance floors were plagued by near-empty dance floors at the recently closed Music Box venue, it would have been inconceivable that Principe would host a party at Lux – widely considered among the best nightclubs in Europe – let alone pack the nearly 1,500-capacity hall with the likes of techno legend Richie Hawtin in attendance.

But while the popularity of Friday’s party will give you a sense of Principe’s reach, it’s just a footnote in the ever-evolving story of Europe’s most exciting dance centre. Principe has been supporting marginalized Afro-Portuguese electronic producers from the outskirts of Lisbon since 2011, threading the threads of the country’s myriad African diaspora beats – and as a result, bringing the soundtrack of the city’s post-2000 clubs to the attention of the world stage.

batida – literally meaning “rhythm” – is the key to Principe’s sound. Referring to the beat-driven club style born in Lisbon’s Quinta do Mocho social housing project, Batida takes high-energy Angolan kuduro music, cutting vocals and leads into electronic influences. “The first step is batida,” says producer Marlon Silva, also known as DJ Marfox. “Then you add elements of Funana, Simba and traditional music.” Funana is party fuel from Cape Verde, while simba is traditional music and dance from Angola.

“Batida is an electronic way of playing African music from the diaspora,” says Zixa, who grew up in Quinta do Moca. “It is a community voice that comes from and within the community, and between artists,” she says.

Principe is inherently political, decolonizing dance soundtracks in Portugal through a collection of instrumental electronic music by black artists. Portugal historically “doesn’t give opportunities to these artists,” says Marcio Matos, co-founder of Principe, when we meet at Casa Principe’s new headquarters in the western part of Lisbon. He remembers the mistrust he faced among some of the artists’ families when he first tried to convince them to join his label. “I told DJ Lycox’s mother: ‘We’re going to release Lycox music. We’re good people, trust us.’

Matos is one of the label’s four founders, along with José Moura, Nelson Gomez and Pedro Gomez (who later parted ways with Principe), a group of friends who were variously integrated into the Lisbon scene as DJs, promoters, journalists and co-founders of record shops. Like many of the best creative endeavours, Principe was conceived without a concrete plan. All they knew was that they wanted to celebrate the exciting sounds of techno kuduro shaking the city, and that the record sleeves had to be hand-painted. Marcio Matos draws inspiration for his distinctive designs from Batida’s raw, DIY sensibility, where artists would often work with cracked versions of music production software FruityLoops (now known as FL Studio) and distill amazing rhythmic music down to its bare essentials.

Príncipe’s first release came in 2011: the whimsical, upbeat Eu Sei Quem Sou by Marlon Silva, the pioneering Portuguese DJ and producer DJ Marfox. Born in Lisbon to parents from São Tomé and Principe, Silva has been active as a DJ since the early 2000s, playing at local meets with his school friends in Quinta do Mocho, a neighborhood in Lisbon with a large immigrant population from former Portuguese colonies (including Angola, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe). He formed the pioneering DJ crew Batida Djheto in 2005.

Having first met Nelson Gomez and Pedro Gomez in the late 2000s, Silva helped the emerging Principe crystallize his vocal identity, forging bridges with other artists across the sprawling Batida community. He has also become the main tastemaker behind the popular Noites Príncipe brand – a nightclub chain that started in 2012 at the Musicbox, in the middle of the city’s very touristy Pink Street.

“It was a big struggle to get people from the neighborhoods to start coming to Musicbox because they weren’t coming downtown,” Matos recalls. “African nightlife has its own parties.” It would take several years for club night to really take off. “Spending an African night in Cais do Sodre has implications for the security guards and the police, because Portugal is a racist country.” But the label persevered, and Nuet Principe eventually became a regular playground for new batida-adjacent artists to showcase their musical ideas.

Meanwhile, the label’s recorded output has been going from strength to strength after the breakthrough 2013 release from DJ Nigga Fox – the slippery vanguard of O Meu Estilo – put Principe on the international map. Later records rarely miss a beat. The haunting debut of Nídia Nídia é Má and Nídia é Fudida, the sensual jams of Sonhos & Pesadelos by DJ Lycox, and Danifox’s bluesy take on Batida, Ansiedade, are standout moments.

Xexa’s debut album Vibrações de Prata was released in 2023 and took the label’s experimental mindset to another level, conjuring a cosmic journey of Afrofuturist sonic art. “I’m creating an archive that wasn’t created through a European perspective of what my music is,” explains Zeixa, who is originally from Sao Tome and Principe. “And then, if you follow São Tomé’s music, you’ll find my song too.”

Neither Ferreira nor Matos wants to predict what the brand will look like in the next 15 years, or how things will go for either of them, but Ferreira extols the virtues of patience in brand management. “Patience helps intelligence and builds strength… Sometimes you have to wait, and just see where it goes.”