This interview was conducted in Portuguese and translated to English by a native speaker
Douglas Silvestre lives and breathes the rhythms of funk, but the 22-year-old occasionally needs a break for the pounding rhythms of mandelão. Scrolling through his Spotify during a video call, connecting voices from Sao Paulo to ears in New York, Douglas Silvestre boasts his intense Alex G fandom, and marks Grimes, Lorde, and Crystal Castle as artists in his rotation.
Dig deep enough into d.silvestre’s SoundCloud and you’ll find a set of guitar tracks that seem nothing like the bone-bruised funk millions love. The demos only feature light production – some flanging here, some reverb there – and the playing is rudimentary at best. The tracks, which Douglas recorded at 14, are a piss-poor indicator of the pounding rhythms he’d generate in his life as d.silvestre.
Born in a small town in Rondônia, d.silvestre’s rise to funk notoriety has been a short but dense journey. He only began producing in 2022, when he was 18. Mandelão, the São Paulo-originated baile funk offspring that boasts heavy basslines and crassly chopped samples, wasn’t exactly prevalent in his home region (he now resides in São Paulo). Rather, his love of the sound was triggered by a chance discovery of DJ Magrones’ “AUTOMOTIVO CADE AS INFLUENCER.”
“I was like, ‘are you crazy? This is absurd. This is impossible.” he said, “then I was like, “My God, what is this? Why is this hitting so much?” That’s when I started listening to it more.”
Brazilian funk has held stock in the Western consciousness since the early 2000’s, but a newfound Western interest in the sound has reminded millions of its standing as an experimental movement producing some of the world’s most forward thinking sounds. Though it has come far from the Miami bass offshoot Diplo and M.I.A. colonized in 2007, the ethos remains as underground party music made in Brazil’s urban hubs, like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Whether it’s the recent NTS compilation funk.BR – São Paulo, or the monthly viral clip of DJ Ramon Sucesso chopping samples on an XDJ, authentic baile funk has burrowed its way to global listeners, on top of the millions in Brazil that call themselves funk fans.
Though d.silvestre’s tracks subscribe to the foundations of the genre, his signature can be heard even on his earliest releases. His 2022 collaborations with MC DENADAI highlighted his knack for a dark and looming aesthetic, while his 2023 efforts focused on minimalist textures laid under abrasive acapellas. Morphing overarching funk influences with screeching synth lines and hammering MC vocals, his style came to a head on the 2023’s ESPANTA GRINGO, which features cuts like “Oakley Oakley Oakley,” a redlining frenzy that starts irritating and ends permanently wormed into your brain.
“I actually gave it that name [ESPANTA GRINGO] because I imagine it would scare away the gringos; it’s a violent sound,” Silvestre said, “it’s a very different kind of mandelão. I like it a lot.”
On his latest effort, the self-titled d.silvestre, Silvestre feels a lot more disciplined; reeling in the assertion of ESPANTA GRINGO and only reaching those heights in certain controlled moments. The prowl of his bass tones are no less aggressive, but they understand that, especially in tunes made to scare the shit out of you, less can always be more. Stripping the classic funk format to its bare minimum, d.silvestre emphasizes the power of the low-end with a stark control he hadn’t previously displayed. If ESPANTA GRINGO was an infant wailing at the top of its lungs, d.silvestre is the brooding toddler, hellbent on terrorizing and gaslighting the family until its demands are met.
“My funk audience screams a lot, and people sing and make a lot of noise. “Oakley Oakley Oakley” is like a national anthem; people sing along and always scream,” d.silvestre said, of the massive crowds he regularly commands, “they curse at me a lot, like when I drop the beats”
d.silvestre’s style veers from the norm in the way he manipulates acapellas. He’s certainly not the only DJ to use MCs in a unique way – funk inherited and maintained the traditional MC-DJ relationship that hip-hop had long abandoned – but his repetitive and jagged take on MC acapellas is radical, even for his genre.
“[Other producers] always cut a lot of words from acapella, and there’s a lot of repetition, like “sit, sit, sit.” It makes it more complicated,” Silvestre said, “I wanted to do the same, but it came out different, kind of bizarre. They always cut the acapellas and pick it up a lot. You feel the tempo of the music there…it’s just listening to a lot of funk and then wanting to do the same, but a little different. And then these musical bizzarities come out.
Who’s the best funk MC out right now? For d.silvestre’s money, it’s MC LELE 011, who made multiple appearances on both d.silvestre and O inimigo agora é outro, vol. 2, d.silvestre’s other 2024 release. At just 16, LELE’s rhymes are simple; sultry and breathy. His presence adds a healthy amount of mystique and suave; each track he appears on feels elusive.
For now, d.silvestre is only considering the domestic frontier. The community surrounding funk is incredibly tight knit, even if it is still a confusing craft to outsiders. It’s also hard to ignore the loaded political history associated with. Thanks to its roots in the favela, a term for the slums or ghettos of Brazil, funk has persisted as one of the most heavily persecuted genres in Brazil. The history of government crackdown runs nearly parallel with the history of the genre, with significant legal and pushback stretching back to the early 90’s, all the way to as recently as 2019, when nine people, one as young as 14, were killed after militarized police entered a funk party in Sao Paulo favela.
“The problem is always with funk parties because this type of funk is very aggressive…and many of the lyrics express this anger against the political system,” Silvestre said, who has personally had parties consistently shut down by the police, “There are a lot of MCs who make political, anti-government, anti-police, revolutionary, and anti-fascist songs. I think that’s cool. It has to be like that. I really want to make a very politicized album in the future.”
There’s no current plans for d.silvestre to make an international debut. There is certainly global interest for his craft, especially considering the massive diaspora of Brazilians in the United States and across the globe, but the move wouldn’t currently be sustainable. “There’s no demand for that…I think it’s going to change in a few years,” Douglas said, “we’re going to send a lot of artists abroad. I hope to be one of them.”