DJ Dolores

At first it was Punk: “I was thin, very slim, which made it look like my head was a ball covered with spines balancing on a toothpick … In Aracaju, while walking the streets in torn trousers and wearing boots, the sweetest thing I heard was faggot!”. But in 1986 Helder Aragão moved to Recife to study art, architecture and design, and where, at 30°C, average temperatures were even hotter than in Aracaju. Here he found himself embroiled in the emerging mangue movement and is credited with creating its ubiquitous ‘crabs with brains’ imagery.

Recife is based around three islands and six rivers. The land is a swamp and it’s from the mangue or mangrove that the movement took its name: “In the beginning it was basically a DJ scene, which then consolidated and became dominated by two bands: mundo livre s/a and Chico Science & Nação Zumbi. What was common within the small group was a love of pop culture, from hardcore to hip-hop, from emerging electronics to Algerian raï, without categorization or labels, a paradise of philosophical abstraction.”