Archive note: This newly written account revisits Kalaf Angelo, a subject from Grandpa Style’s earlier history. It draws on published interviews about his writing and music. The original Grandpa Style feature and its photography have not been recovered.
Kalaf Angelo and Kalaf Epalanga
Kalaf Angelo is also known as Kalaf Epalanga, the Angolan writer and musician associated with Buraka Som Sistema. In an interview published by BUALA in 2021, he explained the personal meaning of using Epalanga as his literary name. It was a name inherited from his grandfather, whose diaries and notes had come into his hands. The choice connected his writing with family memory.
Lisbon as material for writing
An earlier 2012 interview with João Carlos offers a view of that literary practice taking shape. Kalaf described how writing columns for Público led to contact with the publisher Caminho and a collection of those pieces. He also developed some of their personal material into fiction.
Discussing Estórias de Amor para Meninos de Cor, he placed Lisbon and its inhabitants at the center of his attention. Childhood memories and travel also fed the work. The city emerges from his account as a place encountered through people, language and movement, with experiences elsewhere continuing to enter the stories.
Rhythm, editing and performance
Music offered another way of reshaping familiar material. In a Norient interview published in 2012, Kalaf and fellow Buraka Som Sistema member Rui Pité discussed adapting tracks from the Angolan dance genre kuduro for their club sets, then making their own songs. Their account places the group within an existing musical culture, responding to the practical needs of performance.
Kalaf also distinguished a format built around DJs and MCs from a fuller live show incorporating drums and percussion. The same project could take different forms on stage. Arrangement involved deciding how the music would reach an audience as well as how a recording was assembled.
Expression across forms
Our reading of these accounts is that writing and music meet through attention and transformation. An encounter can become a column or a story; a rhythm can be rearranged for a different setting. This makes Kalaf’s work a useful part of an archive concerned with how creative people shape their material.
Continue with David Longstreth and Dirty Projectors for another account of musical process, or browse the Grandpa Style Archive.