Our last post on artists from the Kafundó Vol. 1 compilation has been a long time coming, but I assure you it is definitely not because this individual is the least. Here is my long-delayed profile on Rio de Janeiro based producer Omulu!
In the first months of my living in Rio, I was invited over to budding international super-producer Omulu’s house to visit and talk shop for an afternoon. I arrived late after a trying journey, but was welcomed to some mind-blowing sounds when I stepped into his home studio. He had invited DJ Bruninho, a Funk DJ from Rio’s North Zone over, and they were going over some of Bruninho’s experimentations with Bahian Pagode. Already I knew that the two hour journey had been worth it!
It was a fun afternoon of exchange between the three of us. I played samples of some of my songs and influences, Omulu played some of his in-progress tracks, and Bruninho taught me how to tap out a Funk beat on an MPC. At the end of the evening, the three of us walked from Omulu’s house to the metro. At a crosswalk he turned to the two of us and said, “my mission in Rio is to connect Zona Norte and Zona Sul.” For that afternoon he had done exactly that.
I had been meaning to give a proper profile for Omulu for awhile, but the importance of getting it right kept weighing on my head. The reason for the constant second-guessing was the fact that Antonio, as I had come to know him, and I had become friends, and since I had grown proud of my new city, he was one of the few hometown producers highlighted on the Kafundó compilation. Alongside Brazilian DJs such as Tropkillaz, Mauro Telefunksoul, and DJ Dolores (all featured on the comp as well) over the past year Omulu has become one of the most in demand DJs in the country. His desire to build bridges across class and ethnic groups is a welcomed rarity in a place like Rio, and his mission to rep African and indigenous culture in Brazil through electronic music is very much in line with the work that I’ve been engaged in most of my career. In meeting Omulu (through one Zuzuka Poderosa in fact) it seemed that I had found a bit of a kindred spirit in my new home. Besides all that, he and his partner in life and music, Glaucia, are some of the warmest and most sincere people I’ve met anywhere in the world. It didn’t seem like I could sum up in words the significance Omulu and his music have played in my orientation to Rio and Brazil in general.
So, I won’t attempt to do that any further, instead I’ll let him tell it… Go to the man’s Soundcloud page if you want to schooled on the ins and out so the contemporary Brazilian underground electronic scene. The man has his pulse on everything going on from Belem to Puerto Alegre:
And of course while there you can dig into his catalog:
Follow him on Instagram, where besides you can peep some of his travels through beautiful Latin America, he provides some exciting behind the scene footage of his recording process:
And like him on Facebook, where he seems to sum up a lot of his general activity around the web.
His collaboration with NY-based Comrade, featured in Kafundó Vol. 1, helped expand his international profile, and the well deserved attention he has gotten has landed him a recording contract, of which he is finishing up an EP for now.
All in all, I’m very excited to present Omulu to the world via this humble independent label, and very much look forward to seeing where his career goes in the very near future!