In São Paulo, basslines feel like spells and distortion like smoke from a ritual fire. DJ K, known as “o Bruxo,” doesn’t make tracks—he casts them. His new album, Radio Libertadora, isn’t an album at all, but an invocation: pirate radio ghosts woven into the thump of baile funk, history bleeding into the sound of now. This isn’t music for comfort. It’s music as possession.

DJ K has always refused to stay in one genre’s cage. His sound spills over: funk riddims that collapse into horror-movie atmospheres, feedback scraped from rock, shards of cinema soundtracks welded into sub-bass. He calls it bruxaria. At first it was a joke between friends in the studio—“DJ K não está mais produzindo, tá fazendo bruxaria”—but like all good enchantments, it spread. Now it’s his signature, whispered in clubs worldwide, the mark of something unpredictable.

The witchcraft is layered. On Radio Libertadora, the first thing you hear is Carlos Marighella calling for revolution against Brazil’s dictatorship, sampled from a real insurgent broadcast. It’s not nostalgia—it’s urgency. The crackle of the old transmission collides with contemporary distortion, tying underground histories to today’s chaos. Radio once carried codes for survival; DJ K turns that signal into rhythm.

“For those who still don’t understand funk,” he says, “stop looking at what the media shows and start seeing the real talents coming from the bottom.” The statement slices through. In Brazil, funk is criminalized, its creators surveilled, their lyrics used as courtroom evidence. When global media repackages it, funk becomes cleaned up, stripped of danger. K’s bruxaria rejects all that. Instead of climbing into respectability, he drags listeners downward, back into the basements, the favelas, the sweaty streets where the form was born.

The live sets are pure ritual theatre: pyrotechnic clowns, towering sound systems glowing like altars, dancers conjuring chaos around him. Bass drops like curses, samples rupture without warning. The crowd isn’t just watching—it’s being pulled under, moved as if under a spell.

If his last album was “a cry for help,” this one, he says, “is a cry for freedom.” The distinction matters. Funk has always been about survival—making something explosive out of nothing, wringing joy from precarity. But freedom means more than survival. It means turning that chaos into agency, ritualizing it, weaponizing it.

Radio Libertadora doesn’t feel like a record you put on. It feels like stumbling across a pirate frequency in the middle of the night, unsure if what you’re hearing is meant for you, or if you’ve accidentally tuned into something secret, dangerous, alive.

DJ K isn’t producing anymore. He’s opening portals. He’s raising ghosts through bass. He’s doing witchcraft.