DJ Patife

On the crest of the new wave of DJ stars, there has come one DJ Patife, alias Wagner Borges Ribeiro de Souza. Patife started out as an entertainer at parties and balls on the outskirts of São Paulo, where he was born. When he was 13, Patife became DJ of the rap group, Fatos Reais. He played everything, from samba and axé to italo-house. His first contact with drum’n’bass was in 1993, through a friend, DJ Marky, the current leading light of the genre, but who, at the time, was working as a sales assistant at a record shop where Patife bought vinyl records of hardcore techno. Patife decided to invest his money on the new sound, which he regarded as an evolution from hardcore, and started including records of the kind here and there among the music he played as DJ at the Arena Music Hall, in Interlagos. In 1997, on a trip to Europe with DJ Marky, he accompanied one of the top performers of the genre, Roni Size, in the award-giving ceremony of the Mercury Prize. Back in Brazil, Patife started to play his sound, and to gather fans of the style. The release of his first CD at the beginning of 2000, "Sounds of Drum’n’bass", was received with interest by the magazines Muzik and MixMag, the sacred publications of electronic dance music in England, and led to an invitation to release the CD in London. The work of DJ Patife follows a drum’n’bass line with jazz textures, in recordings that mix the Brazilian XRS Land and Drumagic with the English EZ Rollers and John B.