When Nintendo's game developers dreamt up Fox McCloud in the early '90s, they could never have known that the gaming franchise would play a major part in the future of Lisbon underground dance music. At the time, housing projects in Lisbon were filled with kids playing a 3D outer-space shoot-'em-up called Star Fox. As Marlon Silva tells it, everybody in his neighbourhood was playing the game."Because everybody was playing it we all had a nickname ending in fox, my name is Marlon so I was Marfox," he says.Unlike the other kids in his neighbourhood, Silva, at the age of five, was already planning his career as an international DJ. His nom de plume would be DJ Marfox."When I was five I knew I wanted to be a DJ," he says. "I have never wanted another job."Silva is, at 28, the king of Lisbon's new dance music genre, which goes by the name batida.For many years Silva was making a name for himself in the housing projects outside Lisbon, but now his following knows no borders.Batida has begun to shift to hip clubs in the city and dance floors across the world.mini_story_image_hleft1"Most of my audience are immigrants, but the mainstream Portuguese audience is just now starting to pay attention," Silva says, relaxing after just having played a steaming set of batida in club Blå in Oslo, Norway.Greater Lisbon has a metropolitan population of more than three million people. An influx of African immigrants from former Portuguese colonies in the '70s and '80s created the need for mass urban housing, and so housing estates were built, far from the city.Following in Silva's footsteps are an army of new young producers born out of the housing projects. The producers have names like DJ Nigga Fox, DJ Yudi Fox, DJ Karfox, DJ Dadifox, DJ Lilocox, DJ Lycox, DJ Maboku and Nidia Minaj.It seems that from one fox, an entire army has been born."I am the first born," says Silva.DJ Nigga Fox, real name Rogério Brandão, 26, Silva's DJ partner in Oslo, interrupts him."Nigga Fox takes his name from Marfox," he says, sounding like a Jamaican dancehall MC. "People used to call me Nigga, and then there was another guy also called Nigga, so I took fox and became DJ Nigga Fox."This army of young producers from Lisbon have been garnering so much attention that even the legendary UK electronic label Warp has come calling.In April 2015, Warp released Cargaa 1, the first EP in a series of three focused on this burgeoning scene.Cargaa is a popular slang term among Lisbon's young producers, roughly translating as "hot" or "heavy". When announcing the series, the label said that it was "inspired by the sheer amount of incredible young artists in and around Lisbon".So what is batida?The genre question, it seems, is very important. Silva spent most of our interview making sure it was understood.Apparently there has been a lot of lazy reporting, which has described his music as kuduro, the hard-hitting dance style that emerged in Angola in the late 1980s.As Silva explains to me, the music of the current generation of producers from the Lisbon housing projects is batida, which translates as "my beat" or "my crew's style of beats". He says it is a sound that is unique to the housing projects of the Portuguese capital."It is a pure sound, it comes from the ghetto, it's our own."However there is still a large melting pot of influences behind this batida sound. There are the African genres of kuduro, kizomba, funaná, zouk and tarraxinha.Silva downplays non-African influence. He insists that he doesn't need to know the history of house and techno to make batida.Silva now lives in the housing project Quinta do Mocho, 30 minutes outside of Lisbon. His parents are from the island of São Tomé e Príncipe, a former colony in the Gulf of Guinea.When Silva was growing up, his cousin was a DJ, mixing Luso-African genres with Western pop music. "My cousin knew a lot of people," says Silva. "He used to look after me so he took me around with him and that's how I learned to DJ."In fact, Silva began mixing at the age of seven. Eight years later he attended a party in his neighbourhood where a guy called DJ Nervoso was playing his own productions, versions of tarraxinha, a style popularised by DJ Znobia in Angola in the mid 1990s. Silva was impressed with Nervoso's productions and wanted to become a producer himself, not just a DJ.story_article_right1Fast forward to 2011 and the release of DJ Marfox's debut solo EP Eu Sei Quem Sou (I know who I am) on Principe Discos record label.The EP is a banging offering of four tracks that all clock in at about 140 beats per minute and will feel familiar to fans of techno and house as well as fans of kuduro, but these genres are like gentle smudges on Silva's sonic construct.Frenetic percussion, rooted in Angola, wraps itself around pounding kick drums, bone-shaking basslines and samples that feel like sound effects from long-forgotten computer games."There are a lot of different sounds that are coming out of Lisbon now, it's great, all these new voices," says Silva."I knew this music could take over the world, I didn't know how to get it out of our neighbourhood, but I am not surprised that people are showing the music love."He says the DJs from the Lisbon projects "are exploring music from our roots", an acknowledgement of the African genres that have been combined to create batida."We imagine Africa in our heads when we are making music. Now in Angola, people are interested in what we are doing and are trying to do the same thing," he says. "We are speaking to each other."An example of what Silva is talking about is the EP Connected to the World, which was released in May by Angolan producer DJ Satellite. It features a collaboration between DJ Satellite and Silva called Lisbuanda, and the sound on the EP is a new hybrid of Luanda's kuduro and Lisbon's batida.Principe Discos' next break-out release was Brandão's EP, O Meu Estilo (my style).Brandão was born in Angola and lived there till the age of four when he fled the civil war with his parents. He has been living in Portugal for 20 years.At the Lumiar high school he befriended Silva, who became a mentor to the younger boy.In 2012 Brandão took his music to Silva, who played it for the guys at Principe Discos.They loved it."They asked me if I wanted to release an EP and I said 'yeah', but I didn't know what an EP was," says Brandão.story_article_left2While Silva and Brandão may be hogging most of the global limelight that batida has attracted, Principe Discos is continuing to release more music from various production crews based in the Lisbon housing projects.They all bring their own unique take on batida and show that this is definitely not a scene dominated by one producer alone.Principe Discos' most successful recent release has been from an 18-year-old woman who goes by the stage name Nidia Minaj.Her debut EP, Danger, was released in February and has been winning rave reviews across the world, with Boomkat.com proclaiming it "one of the most crucial, uncontrived and direct debuts we could hope to hear".It is clear that the global electronic music world is much richer thanks to the work of Principe Discos, but it's also clear that with fresh new stars in the making like Nidia Minaj, this is only the beginning for a sound born in Africa and honed in Lisbon...