Music

Your Mix Fix: DJ Dolores

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The word mixtape has plenty of different interpretations. It used to be that mixtapes were actually DJ sets recorded on cassette tapes, but with the coming of the digital music age, the name remained the same, but the definition expanded. Nowadays, people call mixtapes many different things, some of which are not necessarily mixed and most of which were never taped. Here we try to cover them all. In this column, Juan Data gives you a worthy one every week.

DJ: Dolores
MIXTAPE: Fogo Na Shanah

It doesn’t feel like it but it’s carnaval season. As someone who grew up in the southern hemisphere, carnaval to me will always be synonymous with tropical summer and curvy women dancing in almost invisible thongs. That’s one of the few things I’ll never get used to about living in the north. I was never an active carnaval participant, but I knew I could rely on the month of February to always flood our TV programming with wobbling bubble butts covered in glitter—you couldn’t escape it.

If you also miss carnaval and you can’t afford to travel to Rio and join the festivities, well, at least you get to download and listen to this mixtape put together by one of the biggest and most respected DJs in Brazil. DJ Dolores has been active in the scene since the late ’80s helping create mangue beat, the fusion genre that exploded in the ’90s from his hometown, Recife. Since then he hasn’t stopped.

Fogo Na Shanah is his latest mixtape and it’s a 30-minute sampler of current left-field Brazilian dance music, avoiding classics and clichés (no “Magalenha” here). It even includes a remix done by New York’s Uproot Andy! It’s not as good as watching the butts parade from the Sambadrome bleachers but if you close your eyes and try really really hard you might be able to temporarily forget about the winter and feel some of the heat of that fogo.

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