Left to right: Márcio Matos, Pedro Gomes, Nelson Gomes, José Moura, André Ferreira

Several days before the party, I met with three of the four Príncipe founders at one of Lisbon's oldest dive bars, in the Bairro Alto neighbourhood. Pedro Gomes, who speaks eloquent English with a voice softened by Marlboro Reds, was a natural spokesperson for the group. Nelson Gomes and Márcio Matos drank bagaço, a Portuguese equivalent of grappa that's referred to locally as "fire water." Pedro explained that he met Nelson ten years ago, when they were working on an Animal Collective show in Lisbon. In 2007, they started Filho Único, an independent cultural association that has brought acts like Hype Williams, Ariel Pink and R Stevie Moore to the city. Márcio, meanwhile, worked at Flur, a record shop run by José Moura, who is the fourth core member of Príncipe.Nelson, who has the longest involvement with club music out of the group, had become disillusioned with the style. He grew up in Vila Chã, an area with a large Angolan and Cape Verdean community, and he would actively seek out music of African origin. In 2007, Marta Pina, a social outreach worker in the projects and Nelson's girlfriend, told him about a performance at Nove Bairros Novos Sons (Nine Neighbourhoods New Sounds), an initiative where bands from different neighbourhoods shared a stage. The act was Kotalume, who sang over funaná, an up-tempo, celebratory type of Cape Verdean music. Nelson was blown away by the show and urged Pedro to come see a repeat of the performance the next day. It turned out that the beat that caught their ear was written by DJ Marfox, who insisted on being on stage with Kotalume to take credit for his track, pretending to operate a turntable to show his involvement. (The group all laughed as they told the story.)"What do these guys want?" says Marfox, remembering Nelson and Pedro approaching him after the show. "Do they want to take advantage of me? Do they want to get something out of me? I wasn't used to dealing with those kinds of people. It was very confusing for me in the first 24 hours. Do they want to work with me?"Over the following months, the group slowly got to know one another, gradually building each other's trust. As they began their research, Pedro and Nelson confirmed a shared suspicion that electronic, club-focussed versions of kuduro and funaná were being produced in Lisbon. Pedro started recognising Marfox beats blaring from cars in the city centre. Nelson and Pedro got talking with Márcio and José, and decided that, with Marfox and other local acts like Photonz and Niagara on board, they would start a label that presented Lisbon club music to the world. "Let's work together and change things," Nelson says of their proposal to Marfox. "Let's make your music work in the city, and expose the amazing things you do to everybody."Marfox was 19 when he met Pedro and Nelson, and was already a DJing icon in African communities throughout Portugal and Europe. He travelled the continent for gigs, but wasn't known for—and couldn't play—the tougher, fresher style of kuduro and funaná he was producing. The crowds in African clubs (a term Portuguese people use to describe venues where African immigrants go to party) wanted accessible and, moreover, aspirational styles of music—not the raw, "ghetto" style Marfox was making.I met Marfox on a drizzly afternoon in Quinta do Mocho, a housing project about a 30-minute drive from the centre of Lisbon. The project is a grid of beige and yellow buildings, with palm trees (a Portuguese obsession, Pedro told me) lining the streets. Marfox's apartment was buzzing when we arrived. Gathered in the bedroom where Marfox makes his music were DJ Nervoso, DJ Firmeza and DJ Liofox, who are all now signed to Príncipe, along with other friends and Édi, Nervoso's young son. Everyone in the room lived locally.

DJ Marfox

DJ Nervoso and Édi

Blacksea Não Maya

Marfox, whose real name is Marlon Silva, grew up in Quinta da Vitória, about ten minutes away from Quinta do Mocho. His family is from the island of São Tomé e Príncipe, a former Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea. He listened to kizomba, samba and kuduro as a kid, and was exposed to jazz and Brazilian pop through his father. Inspired by his cousin, who was a local DJ, Marfox started mixing music with old tape decks when he was seven. In 2004, he attended a party in his neighbourhood where DJ Nervoso was performing. Among other styles, Nervoso was playing his own attempts at tarraxinha—a type of slowed-down Angolan dance music that was pioneered by a producer called Znobia over ten years ago. "I wanted to be like him," Marfox said through Pedro, who was translating for us. "I decided he was like a model for me."Nervoso, who is also from São Tomé e Príncipe, is seen as a godfather figure for the scene. A shy man (hence his name) of 30, who now lives in Morocco where he works in construction, he spoke to me on Marfox's couch with Édi on his lap. Nervoso began making music as a teenager, and later incorporated his productions into the DJ sets he played around his neighbourhood and in African nightclubs. He told me about the "loops" of his early music that would make people feel "out their minds" and would turn the party "into chaos." Pedro later said that these moments are considered to be the ground zero for the Lisbon scene."DJ Nervoso's style was always an inspiration to everybody," says DJ Lilocox, a fellow Príncipe artist, "and everybody was listening to it. I wouldn't even be thinking about making my own music if it wasn't for people like him—I probably wouldn't even make music at all."Without exception, everyone I spoke with in Lisbon cited a compilation called, which was released digitally in 2006 (and later re-released by Príncipe), as a pivotal moment for the scene. By this time Marfox, working under the tutelage of Nervoso, was starting to make his name as a producer. The compilation was the product of a shaky alliance between crews from different neighbourhoods. It featured music by DJ Pausas, DJ Fofuxo (both of whom belonged to the Máquinas do Kuduro group), DJ N.K, DJ Jesse, DJ Nervoso and DJ Marfox. They coincided the release with the first day of a new school year. "All the youth loved it, everybody was listening to it," says Marfox."They were important because they were one of the first crews who rose to become well known or respected doing this style," says DJ Kolt. "You could hear them in several neighbourhoods and it spread out." The group didn't stay together long—Marfox mentioned in-fighting and egos—but the impact of the compilation is still being felt today. "Everybody still asks: what happened to DJ's Do Guetto?" Marfox says. DJ Firmeza and DJ Liofox, who I also met at Marfox's apartment, named their crew, Piquenos (little) DJs Do Guetto, in honour of the group.In explaining the three-year gap between their initial contact with Marfox and Príncipe releasing its first record, Marfox's Eu Sei Quem Sou , Pedro referred me to London's grime scene. "Dizzee Rascal got a record deal," he says. "Wiley got a record deal—both great records—and then Kano got a record deal. I saw what happened after Kano got a record deal. The 500 MCs who were much more respected than him got pissed off. This music was coming from impoverished roots. And it was basically mauled and violated by unconscious, not very serious record labels, who were making decisions, very serious decisions, on what was basically community music, which had its own communitarian hierarchy and order and logics, which were totally overlooked. And so because I saw that… I saw how tragic that was… I didn't want us to repeat the same mistake. It took us a very long time to understand who was who. Who did what first? Why is it important? Why is it more important than that?"Pedro, Nelson and Márcio spoke of complex negotiations and periods of trust building with producers, a process Pedro described as "inter-cultural equalising." Príncipe's fifth release , a compilation that included tracks from the Blacksea Não Maya and Piquenos DJs Do Guetto crews, took over a year to execute. "It took us a long time, for us to get these people's confidence, and vice versa," Pedro says. "We don't do shit unless it's transparent. And we wanted them to understand and know that what we wanted to present was what they do... We didn't want watered-down versions for Western consumption.""The general feeling was that we thought they were really weird," says DJ Kolt, of Blacksea Não Maya.I visited Blacksea Não Maya, a crew that also includes DJs Perigoso and Noronha, at their cousin's house in the Cucena project, about 30 minutes south of the city centre. In a small side bedroom, Blacksea Não Maya explained how DJ Joker, who founded their crew but no longer lives in Portugal, was initially suspicious of Príncipe's motives, and tried to stop the group from working with the label. But DJ Kolt, who was inspired by a video he'd seen of Piquenos DJs Do Ghetto playing at a Príncipe party, wanted to be involved. He met with Márcio at a Príncipe party at Musicbox to make an agreement. Nelson and Márcio had earlier told me about a meeting with the crew's family (Perigoso and Noronha are brothers; Kolt is a distant cousin), describing them as being suspicious of Príncipe's intentions.Lisbon's topography is the best place to start in understanding its cultural divide. The city, which is Portugal's capital, has an urban population of just over half a million people (on a land area of 84 km2) and a metropolitan population of over three million people (on a land area of 2,957 km2). After Portugal's 1974 revolution, when it again became a democracy, an influx of immigrants from former colonies like Angola created a large-scale need for housing. Urban planners used land deep into Lisbon's peripheries, but didn't put in place the transport links required to connect these newly formed communities to the city. "The level of separation was extreme," says Pedro. "We didn't do ghettos the way New York City did ghettos, the way London did council houses. We put these people in the middle of fucking nowhere, sometimes with no roads to connect them to civilisation. Far fucking away. And 40 years after the revolution these people are still isolated. And the level of distrust that they have with us is totally justified.""There are a lot of projects around Lisbon," says DJ Lilocox, "and in Lisbon there are tourists, there are lots of people, stuff is going on—but tourists don't come out here, people don't come out here, because they are afraid of getting robbed. In some places that can happen, in other places that can happen, but that can also happen in Lisbon. It's just the fine that these places get because they're projects."