Buraka Som Sistema’s vocalist Kalaf on spreading the kuduro gospel, black diamonds vs blood diamonds and the never-ending festival circuit.

It’s been almost six months since the release of ‘Black Diamond’. Are you happy with the album, and the reaction to it?

Yes it’s been great. We still don’t know entirely what’s happening in places like Japan or America because we were there when the album had just got released so there’s no proper time to see how it went down. Everyone has been real supportive about it - and now with blogs and things you can see how everything is going and it seems to be going well.

You mentioned Japan - it’s perhaps not a nation with a huge kuduro scene. Do you find it surprising how far you’ve reached considering it’s such a ‘local’, specific sound?

Well, I think for most people, we are just a ‘dance’ act, people don’t se us as a kuduro group. OK, we have a strange sound but basically it’s just dance music and people respond to that.

You’ve been playing more live sets with a full-on band as opposed to DJ set. Which works best for you?

With a DJ set you respond to the crowd, so if they are giving us a good vibe we’ll follow that and make it into a party. With the live show, it’s us who are setting the vibe for the crowd - we can control (it) more and decide where we want to take the crowd and where we want to send the people. It’s basically just a huge rave, punk, dance, loud, live party!

You’re currently doing the festival circuit. Obviously in the clubs, people are there just to see you but with festivals there’s going to be a lot of people who are hearing you for the first time. Does this make a difference to the show?

We like both really. When you’re in a venue where you’re the headline and it’s kind of like your show the crowd is definitely more familiar. In a festival we have to kind of seduce the crowd. You could start playing the first song to a half full tent but then five minutes after, it’s madness. We like that. It’s like a challenge for us.

Fuji Rock last month in Japan was a completely different set up to the club show we did in Tokyo. It was great but like I was saying it’s different when you’re the only act playing in the venue. Then at the festival, we were there, Major Lazer were there and a lots of other acts so you go in there to prove yourself and show what you can do with the crowd.

I think that’s the main difference and it’s a difference we enjoy, it’s kind of like you have to forget everything you know in terms of how to move a crowd, forget how it went anywhere else and just look at who’s in front of you and try to give what they expect but also surprise them. That’s the whole fun element of our live shows. People don’t know us anyway so everything we do is a surprise but it’s really fun.

You’re sharing bills with Major Lazer all summer – how did you start working with Diplo in the first place?

We became friends really. A long time ago we bumped into Diplo when he was on top of the whole Baile Funk thing, because we’re from Portugal and Angola we have a connection. So afterwards we were in touch through Myspace, sending music back and forth. It was all very organic, we used to end up playing the same parties and we invited him to Lisbon to go to the studio and do something. He’s a good friend so work is something that comes secondary.

Of course it’s work but our approach is quite different, we like to change it to go to the studio, invite people over here and in the meantime if everybody’s free to do a collaboration someone will just be like ‘Let me do something on this track’ or ‘Let me send you something to remix or let me remix something of yours’. It makes the whole process easier.

Your latest track ‘IC19’ has of a lot of remixes - some from the Mad Decent camp, some not. Do you decide who you want to remix your stuff and who you want to do remixes for or is it a label decision?

Sometimes we just make up tracks and basically they never go anywhere, they’re just bootlegs and mixtapes. You pick up a track and do your own version to use in the DJ set, bootlegs of things what we like, remixes and re-edits. If our friends like the track, they’ll ask us for it and start playing their own version of it and what started out as a track for us to play at our set turns out to be a bit of a remix.

A lot of the time too though if we see a track we like we’re definitely gonna look for an accapella for it but if we don’t find it and our label makes a decision for us on what to remix, we’re happy with that too. So when it comes to remixes we just have fun, we don’t make political decisions.

You followed the ‘Black Diamond’ album with the ‘Blood Diamond’ mixtape – what was the thinking behind it?

Well, when we finished the album, it sounded a bit serious to us, we kind of missed the fun element of our music because we like to have fun and make people happy with our music. With ‘Black Diamond’ we were very focused on the concept of the album, the idea of it is attached to things like oil and war diamonds and this kind of thing so we thought why don’t we flip that and make it more clear with the title ‘Blood Diamond’. We wanted to show what it means to go into a mine and pick up a black rock and give it to someone and let them decide if that piece of rock is worth the $1 million that people pay for these things or is it just an ugly rock. All the ‘rocks’ we saw straight from the mines were really ugly in a way so we wanted to play with that, like what’s the value of a diamond? You can really put your blood on it, not just dying for it, but people spending everything they have, their children’s college money on a diamond you know?

The whole thing with ‘Blood Diamond’ is not only referring to Africa or the mines in South America but also what we do here in Europe or North America you know, we give our blood for that, it’s all attached. We buy it so we are all responsible for it, it’s us connecting things and if you listen to the tracks it’s all about crossing musical frontiers in terms of what should be done with culture and it’s not just demanding for natural resources like oil or diamonds or anything like that. We all exploit different things - be it doing that or spending ridiculous money on silly things.

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