It was 4AM in late-September in Sao Paulo. Some new friends and I were walking along a makeshift path bounded by a grass-covered train track and a line of abandoned boxcars. A thickset bouncer guarding a gap in the middle of the wall checked our IDs and guided us inside. Moments later, we emerged into a rave happening in an abandoned train yard. Tagged wagons were scattered across the grounds. Some lay dark and dormant; others were alight with mini-parties. En masse, the caravan formed a maze-like perimeter around several DIY stages and dancefloors bumping Brazilian-inflected techno.
The party's organizer, Mamba Negra , has become an integral part of the São Paulo underground. Mamba co-founder Carol Schutzer—AKA Cashu —played her minimal, Afrobrazilian-influenced techno at Dekmantel São Paulo in the festival's first international edition this year. Established in 2013, the female-run party collective/ record label throws parties in neglected, often unregulated spaces in the city—and they're often willing to circumvent the law to do so. Mamba events are more than just parties; they're also guerilla tactics, occupations of contentious spaces that highlight the city's inequalities and factious politics.
On the night I was there, Mamba (legally) occupied an abandoned North São Paulo spot called Nos Trilhos ("On Rails"). An "electronic jam session" outfit called Teto Preto —comprised of Mamba co-founder Laura Diaz (aka Carneosso ), Willliam Bica, and two of São Paulo's premiere producers, L-cio and Zopelar —was the night's bellwether. They mixed tribal drums and bulging synths with horn players, dancers, and vocalists, and all night we danced beneath the black pillars of an abandoned train track.
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