Read this next: Brega funk is the music of Recife that's taking over Brazil I mean, my track 'Desande' is the purest desande.' Executing sharp cuts with the CDJ knobs and forgoing headphones-'I'm used to the cues and drops,' he says- Pedro is the face of desande. A skinny boy with an unthreatening voice, he reminds me of a superhero who embodies a secret persona once the cape is on-in his case, the cape is a sombrero-style hat that's become his signature mark whenever he's behind the decks. 'You need an appealing bassline, vocals that stick to your mind and a groove, a good one', says Illusionize, real name Pedro Mendes. Their music pivots around slick, multilayered basslines, bold kicks, catchy build-ups, minimal key lines, loads of vocal shots, and the groove-a term the DJs use to speak about the untranslatable flavour of the counter-metric rhythms that underlies several Brazilian music genres. Today Lou is a proud defender of desande alongside Illusionize, Visage and a number of other Brazilian DJs and producers like Almanac, Carola, Sterium, and Flux Zone, to name a few. 'At first, I was ashamed to call that desande, but then I realized that this is something of ours, created by us, and desande is the only idea we can relate to when thinking about this kind of music.'

'I remember that when I finally started to release tracks, a few years ago, a lot of people asked me what that kind of music it was,' says Lou. It was only around 2018 when the word became a tag for his music-making. It was the beginning of the 2010s and knowing the whereabouts of a desande (which means literally 'misstep') was an unmissable invitation for a young kid in GoiГўnia who was into partying and raving. 'Desande was just a slang word at the time, something we used like 'let's go to a desande',' explains Lou.

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