A sonic thinking of dirt and noise: the sound of favela funk DJs

GG Albuquerque

“Listen to the tuin!” announces MC Bin Laden. At that moment, a sharp, continuous buzzing sound cuts through “Lança de Coco – Passinho do Romano,” piercing our eardrums and inducing a dizzying sensation. Produced by Mano DJ, this 2014 hit foreshadowed a sound that, nearly a decade later, would become central to the Brazilian funk music scene at street parties in São Paulo’s South Zone: the tuin.

Tuin is the term funk enthusiasts (funkeiros) uses to describe the auditory hallucination triggered by the use of “lança”, a drug frequently consumed in the bailes, the street parties of the favelas. Its effects include tingling in the hands, a buzzing sound in the ears, and heightened sensitivity to loud noises, particularly high-pitched frequencies. But while in MC Bin Laden’s track, the tuin served as a special effect, in contemporary baile funk, this sound has been radicalized, becoming the foundation of a new mutation of the famous brazilian beat: funk Bruxaria (witchcraft funk). In “Tuin Destrói Noia” by DJs K, Menor 7, Noguera, and Magro, for instance, the tuin becomes the backbone of the beat, at one point blending two tuins simultaneously.

By exploring the distorted, high-volume texture of the tuin, funk producers incorporates and subverts elements the music industry often deems as “mistakes”—such as noise, distorted mixing, and raw textures that push everything into the red. Paradoxically, the DJs from the favela bailes often speak about their artistic experimentation in terms that align with the commercial logic of the music industry. DJ K, for example, transforms the widespread attention crisis and the social media algorithms into a musical form: “When you analyze your YouTube data, people usually watch 40 seconds of the video, you know? Sometimes, they only listen to a minute of the song. So, in that one minute, in those 40 seconds, I try to make everything shine”, he explains in a scene from the documentary Terror Mandelão (2024).

Jeeh FDC, producer of the more rhythmic and less aggressive style of funk known as Ritmada, also references competition when discussing his work in music production. In 2021, while the noisy and sound of Bruxaria was gaining popularity, Jeeh FDC, then just 17 years old, decided to go the opposite route. His track “Beat da Felicidade” (happiness beat), one of his early hits, became a success with its brighter, more upbeat sound, as the name suggests, sampling steel pan sounds. In an interview, he explains: “If you create something different, funk is yours, you feel me? It’s in your hands. You know why? Because when you create something, it resonates, and once it resonates, someone else will do the same thing. And so it goes, it becomes a trend, it follows and follows… You’ve got to think completely against the grain, seriously. Because if you go in the same direction as everyone else, you’ll end up just being [one] more [in the] competition.”

In the remarks of DJ K and DJ Jeeh FDC, the logic of digital audience retention and competition, respectively, are invoked as driving forces to explore new sounds, which would later be followed by other artist-competitors. Reversing the common understanding that sees commercial logic as mere reproduction of trends and “formulas for success,” for these DJs, there is no antagonism between experimentation and the industry. In funk mandelão, the avant-garde is popular, and vice versa. However, the norms of the market are rethought, modulated, and viewed through a different lens, resulting in new approaches to creative work. When we observe how the sonic thinking developed by racialized and marginalized artists moves ambiguously between the market and experimentation, we see in Black imagination a dynamic of escape that avoids complete capture by contemporary identity-driven capitalism, even as it directly negotiates with its framework.

a sonic thinking of dirt, noise and embrazamento

Producer of tracks like “O Mundo é Putaria” and “Puta Mexicana,” DJ Jeeh FDC became known for a style of funk that he classifies as “melodic rhythm”, a combination of slower rhythms and melodic vocals (sometimes with an sexy-R&B aura) with the pressure of Ritmada’s syncopated percussion. But Jeeh warns: “You gotta have a bit of dirt in there, it’s gotta be dirty, it’s gotta be favelado (from the favela), you feel me? But being favelado doesn’t mean it has to be totally messy. Things gotta be in their place, you know? But still, always dirty, dirty.”

With this, Jeeh draws an association between “dirt” and favelas or marginalized areas. On the other hand, the producer emphasizes that the dirt has nothing to do with negligence or lack of refinement in the production and musical aspects. When I ask him what this “dirt” is, he responds: “We have this power to make everything distorted, but still equalized—that’s dirt. Not just distorted, but letting it clipping in volume.”

The “dirt” is conceptualized by the producer as a sonic characteristic, not necessarily tied to sexually explicit lyrics — which are very common in the funk scene. Another point is that dirt is directly associated with noise and high volume, to clip the mix, thus going against the technical norms of mixing in the music industry, which avoids clipping and distortion. Jeeh also sees dirt as an expressive tool produced by a favela subjectivity (“it’s gotta be from the favela,” “always dirty”), and he views it as a kind of “favela way” of producing, channeling a particular creativity connected to a way of life in urban peripheries that resists the logic of sanitization and and technical-aesthetic homogenization.

Jeeh FDC’s ideas find a parallel in the thoughts of Rio de Janeiro DJ Renan Valle. Producer of favela bailes hits and TikTok virals like “Uma Foda” and “Sarra nos Menor que tá de Glock na Cintura,” Renan Valle is a DJ from the Nova Holanda and P.U. (Parque União) street bailes and proposes an idea of dirt and noise that is intertwined with a socio-cultural and political reflection on sound. For him, the funk made for favela bailes is noisier than other branches of the genre because it engages with the life and soundscape of the communities:

“People from the favelas like something more, let’s say, ‘amateur’. When it gets too clean, it’s no longer an urban sound. If you pay attention, the favela has its own sound. I know when there’s an police operation in the favela. Why? Because there’s silence. [Typically] The favela has kids running, birds flying—you hear them in the singing when you wake up at 5 AM, motorcycles going back and forth, moms yelling at their kids… So the favela has its own sound. This is so much a part of our daily routine that when we make music, we want that noise. It’s rooted in us. We want that vibe. It’s not because we like a dirty sound and we don’t care. It’s because

it’s part of our soundscape, of our daily life. The noise is here. And when there’s an [police] operation, man, the police bring such silence to the favela that you can’t even hear the birds at 5 AM, no dogs barking, no motorcycles passing, no cars, no moms yelling at their kids. They silence the favela, man. (…) The sound of violence is silence. What we’re afraid of is the silence.”

Renan Valle points to a form of terror imposed through silence. In Rio de Janeiro’s war on drugs (in reality, a war on the poor, as sociologist Adriana Facina and many others points out), silence is the voice of fear and the violent, threatening power of the State, which enters the favelas only under the logic of police invasion. Noise, on the other hand, becomes the expression of life happening, flowing through both humans (the mother calling her child) and non-humans (motorcycle engines, birds singing, dogs barking). In Valle’s view, funk music from favela bailes appropriates intense sound frequencies, heavy bass and noisy textures to create aesthetic experiences that channel this vital energy, the “soundscape of the favela,” as the producer calls it, into an experience that mobilizes the collective body of the baile funk, transcending the codes of individual, solipsistic listening centered only on the ears.

DJ K, Jeeh FDC, and Renan Valle develop a cosmoperception of noise that is notably distinct from the Western experimental music tradition, which also incorporated dissonance and noise as expressive resources under a different logic and worldview. In noise music, there’s often an inclination toward pain, as researcher and composer Lílian Campesato points out, but in the sonic blackness of funk, noise expresses the release of repressed vital energies, as DJ ZL from Complexo do Flamengo, in the far north of Belo Horizonte, suggests: “What I want to express to people when they’re listening to [my] music is for them to freak out, to let go. You don’t have to stay trapped because we’re already trapped too much in certain ways, you feel me? When someone’s listening to the music, I want them to feel the freedom to be who they are. For me, the more aggressive [the sound], the more liberating it is, because people can embrazar more.”

The idea of embrazamento (or getting fired up) mentioned by DJ ZL describes an embrazado (“ignited”) state of mind, often heard in various funk tracks, and also discussed by baile attendees and partygoers. The term likely stems from brasa (ember), conveying a sense of heat. In the context of the bailes, however, embrazar carries a meaning tied to invigorating vitality and intoxicating joy, urging full surrender to the party, embracing the present moment without the weight of future anxieties. “The sonic blackness of funk sparks a new sensibility of listening, rooted in a different cosmoperception, where noise becomes a channel for pleasure, jubilation, and ultimately, embrazamento—a movement toward experiencing existence beyond colonial political death projects.”.

The dirt-noise of funk resonates with the idea of a “dirty psychology” proposed by Sofia Favero (2022). “Making room for the dirty is to close off space for the nefarious. Dirt is aggressive, but cleanliness is truly violent. It was the pursuit of purity that led us to embody a colonial, imperialist, bloodthirsty cosmology. Is this the life that awaits us?” the author provocatively questions. Cleanliness, she argues, is rooted to a colonial and imperialist project of violence. This is because the duality of cleanliness versus dirt also implies the fabrication of an ego-driven thought of cis-normative, hetero-masculine whiteness, which narrates itself

as clean, healthy, and normal. In this sense, Frantz Fanon asserts that “White civilization and European culture have forced an existential deviation on the Negro. What is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact” (FANON, 2008, p. 30). As such, Favero argues that “getting dirty is not only about handling impurities but also signals the precarious way in which the white, male, heterosexual, slim, and cisgender society constructs their subjectivity in culture: always attributing a condemnable, bad status to their minor other” (FAVERO, 2022, p. 30).

From this perspective, funk, with its tuin, distorted mixes, loud sounds, and blasting sound systems materializes an artistic approach that affirms its political strength symbolically amidst the destruction of its ways of life. In contrast to the tech and music industry, the “dirt” of DJs and producers from Brazilian favelas stains the technical norms and expertise of major studios professionals with a sonic epistemology that rises from the possibilities of resistance and creativity shaped by impurity and scarcity.

Recently, music from global peripheries has gained increased attention through tags like guettotech or global bass, often framed within a narrative that revives the racist biases of the old world music concept, portraying these musical cultures as the work of poor people who, even with access only to outdated, pirated, or cheap technology, somehow produce magical beats because rhythm is supposedly in their blood — in their primitive essence. When discussing Angolan kuduro, Stefanie Alisch (2020) aptly describes this discourse as a “narrative of scarcity-resilience,” which, by ignoring the complex histories and rich artistic practices that shape kuduro (and we could also see that on other musical genres from the Global South), focuses solely on resilience and risks fostering racist stereotypes about inherent rhythmic and bodily intelligence. It indirectly suggests that Black people lack other forms of intelligence, evoking stereotypical images of Africans dancing joyfully, and by extension, Black people everywhere (ALISCH, 2020, p. 666). This narrative is often accompanied by a condescending view that these producers are ignorant of how to “properly” use musical technology. Alternatively, in a more well-meaning version, there’s the belief that “if only they had access to more advanced, powerful, better, and faster software” — a thought that fuels the myth that technology accelerates creativity, perfectly aligning with the marketing dynamics of big tech in the music industry and its endless demand for new products.

At first glance, speaking of sonic epistemologies of dirt and noise in Brazilian funk might seem to align with the scarcity-resilience narratives. However, the point is exactly the opposite: we begin by rejecting the violent sanitization of whiteness to observe how the sonic thinking of DJs and producers turns dirt into a strategy of haunting and disturbing the system that imposes purifying homogeneity upon us. They find vitality and embrazamento in the physicality of the tuin that pierces the eardrums from the booming speakers of deafening sound systems. Noise and dirt become an ethic of dissent, fostering a broad, collective and diverse system of thought guided by inventiveness, capable of imagining new meanings for sound through a unapologetic and perpetually curious relationship with technology. We do not glorify precariousness nor celebrate a resilient victory but seek to view it as a place where

artistic possibilities are crafted beyond the violence and Black trauma¹, transforming the experience of Blackness and subalternization into a formal, artistic proposition — a sonic thought that is constantly searching for resources to resist assimilation and the capture of Black imagination.

¹ “Black trauma” refers to “Negro Drama,” a song by the acclaimed Brazilian rap group Racionais MCs. The song chronicles the life journey of a Black person in Brazil, detailing the social adversities and violence experienced from childhood through adulthood. Given the song’s significant impact in the country, “Negro drama” (something like Black trauma, in english) can be used as a metaphor to the racist conditions that Black individuals in Brazil face throughout their lives.