About the author

First some things about myself, so you know who’s opinions you’re reading...

26-years old, I’m currently working as a free-lance journalist and a photographer. Finnish and normally living in Helsinki, I’ve also been djing and organizing my own club nigths, events and festivals from the year 2001. People in the Helsinki scene will propably remember such names as Hekuma, Old School Throw Down and Bustin Loose!

My first encounter with Rio funk was in January 2005, when I came back to Brazil for the first time since my exchange student year in 1999. I stayed in Rio for almost the whole January living at my friend’s place. I was the time Bonde do Tigrão was at it’s hight of popularity and Baile funk was all over, but since none my friend’s wasn’t into that sound, I didn’t go into any bailes.

Back in Finland I started looking for more of that sound and information about it. In the internet there is fairly little, but enough to feed my curiosity. I’ll show you some of the good stuff in internet later in a separate post. Anyway, I downloaded some music and wondered if there was any on vinyl. (as I dj the question of vinyl is always relevant, since I’m not as comfortable playing with cds yet...) I found a couple of European record labels that have put out funk compilations on vinyl. The one I could get from my local supplier was Slum Dunk Presents Funk Carioca released on Mr. Bongo. After getting the vinyl I put together a mix of my favorite baile funk tunes. I named it Favela 808. It was autumn 2005 and it was the first finnish mix entierly of Rio baile funk.

Photo of the Hekuma crew.

That time I was organizing Hekuma nights with a dancehall soundsystem / live act of the same name at a Helsinki club called Kuudes Linja. So on February 2006 I decided to organize a special night of baile funk. I invited my friend DJ Rudeboy to play as he was also into Rio baile funk.

People liked baile funk so much, that in May we had a reload and I put a night with baile funk and grime. We even had some mcing pon di stage, as MC Boazinha, the singer of Maria Gasolina, a local band playing finnish versions of brazilian songs, got onto the stage to do two songs. The grime part was handled my a superb finnish grime collective, the Dead Boys Massive.


Of course I had been playing Rio baile funk also in other parties along 2005 and 2006, but always among other music styles. Besides parties I had also made some remixes in baile funk style during that time. You can check them and more of my dj stuff out at MySpace: www.myspace.com/djrideon (There are 3 remixes available at the moment.)

Now I’ve been living in Rio since the beginning of October 2006 free-lancing for different news papers, magazines, radios and tv programs with my audio-visual companion Taneli Bruun. You’ll find more about our Rio project at http://mlab.uiah.fi/~lbruun/Riodoc/index.htm (It’s in finnish only, but there are some video clips and a photo portfolio everybody can enjoy.)

Besides working one of my main interests to come to Rio, was to get to know the baile funk scene in here. A lot of things have happened already, but I’ll try tell all the stories along introducing baile funk music and culture in general. Hopefully it’ll all be of some interest and be able to offer some information about a phenomenom that’s yet relatively little covered by international media.