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It’s just after 11.30pm on a Friday in early March, and the air at Lux Frágil is already thick with excitement. Groups of people are streaming in through the Lisbon club’s staircase, past a giant disco ball, and local DJ and producer Xexa is dazzling the crowd with a live set of vocal-sprinkled synthscapes. Soon, the downstairs disco will be heaving with sweaty dancers for scene heroes DJ Marfox, DJ Nervoso and Dariiofox, bodies bumping to the pulse-quickening batida.
Come the early hours of Saturday morning, the upstairs floor is bursting at the seams, with partygoers spilling on to the balcony overlooking the River Tejo, as they raise a 15th birthday toast to Príncipe, Portugal’s gamechanging dance music label, which has taken over the world-renowned nightspot for the first time.
“There were people having fun everywhere – white people, Black people, people that were closer to the artists, people that didn’t know the artists,” says Xexa after the event. “It was nice to see everyone coming for that reason.”
Fifteen years ago, when the Lisbon imprint was reckoning with near-empty dancefloors at the recently shuttered Musicbox venue, it would have been inconceivable for Príncipe to host a party at Lux – widely considered to be among Europe’s best nightclubs – let alone pack out the roughly 1,500 capacity venue with the likes of minimal techno legend Richie Hawtin in attendance.
But while the popularity of Friday’s party will give you a sense of Príncipe’s reach, it’s just a footnote in the ever-evolving story of Europe’s most electrifying dance outpost. Príncipe has been championing marginalised Afro-Portuguese electronic producers from the Lisbon suburbs since 2011, knitting together the threads of the country’s myriad Afro-diasporic rhythms – and bringing the city’s post-2000 club soundtrack to the attention of the global stage as a result.
Batida – literally meaning “beat” – is key to the Príncipe sound. Referring to a percussion-driven club style born in Lisbon’s Quinta do Mocho social housing project, batida takes high-energy Angolan kuduro music, cuts out the vocals and splices in electronic influences. “The first step is the batida,” says producer Marlon Silva AKA DJ Marfox. “Then you add elements from funaná, semba, traditional music.” Funaná is party fuel from Cape Verde, while semba is a traditional music and dance from Angola.
“Batida is an electronic way of doing African music from the diaspora,” says Xexa, who grew up in Quinta do Mocha. “It’s a community sound made from and within the community, between the artists,” she says.
Príncipe is political by nature, decolonising Portugal’s dance soundtrack with a stack of largely instrumental electronic music by Black artists. Portugal historically “doesn’t give opportunities to these artists”, says Príncipe co-founder Márcio Matos when we meet at the new Casa Príncipe HQ in the western part of Lisbon. He recalls the distrust he encountered among some of the artists’ families when he first tried to convince them to join his label. “I said to DJ Lycox’s mother: ‘We will release Lycox’s music. And we are good people, trust us’.”
Matos is one of the label’s four founders, alongside José Moura, Nelson Gomes and Pedro Gomes (who later parted ways with Príncipe), a group of friends who were variously embedded in the Lisbon scene as DJs, promoters, journalists and record shop co-founders. Like many of the best creative endeavours, Príncipe was conceived without a concrete plan. All they knew was that they wanted to celebrate the thrilling techno-kuduro sounds shaking up the city, and that the record sleeves had to be hand-painted. Márcio Matos took inspiration for his distinctive designs from the raw DIY sensibility of batida, where artists often worked with cracked copies of music production software FruityLoops (now FL Studio) and turned in dizzying percussive music stripped back to its essentials.
The first Príncipe release arrived in 2011: the eccentric rave-up Eu Sei Quem Sou by Marlon Silva, AKA pioneering Portuguese DJ and producer DJ Marfox. Born in Lisbon to parents from São Tomé and Príncipe, Silva was active as a DJ since the early 2000s, playing at local get-togethers with his school friends in Quinta do Mocho, a Lisbon neighbourhood with a large population of immigrants from former Portuguese colonies (including Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe). He formed the trailblazing batida crew DJs Di Guetto in 2005.
Having first crossed paths with Nelson Gomes and Pedro Gomes in the late-00s, Silva helped the nascent Príncipe to crystallise its sonic identity, forging bridges with other artists across the sprawling batida community. He also became a key tastemaker behind the label’s now iconic Noites Príncipe – a club night series that began in 2012 at Musicbox, bang in the middle of the city’s uber-touristy Pink Street.
“It was a big struggle to get people from the neighbourhoods to start coming to Musicbox because they didn’t come to the city centre,” recalls Matos. “The African nightlife has its own parties.” It would take several years for the club night to really get going. “Making an African night in Cais do Sodré has implications for the security guards and the police, because Portugal is a racist country.” But the label persevered, and Noite Príncipe eventually became a regular playground for new batida-adjacent artists to showcase their musical ideas.
Meanwhile, the label’s recorded output was going from strength to strength following the 2013 breakthrough release from DJ Nigga Fox – the slippery avant-kuduro of O Meu Estilo – which put Príncipe on the international map. Subsequent records have rarely missed a beat. Nídia’s haunting debut Nídia é Má, 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 came out in 2023 and took the label’s experimental mindset to another level, conjuring a cosmic head trip of Afrofuturist sound art. “I’m creating an archive that is not created by the European perspective of what my music is,” explains Xexa, who is of São Tomé e Príncipe ancestry. “And then if you track São Tomé music, you find mine as well.”
Neither Ferreira nor Matos want to predict what the next 15 years of the label will look like, or how things will pan out for any of them, but Ferreira extols the virtues of patience in running a label. “Patience helps intelligence and builds strength … sometimes you have to wait, and just see where it goes.”
