Pedro Coquenão has spent over a decade making music that actively campaigns against cultural amnesia. As Batida DJ (which translates to "beat" in Portuguese), the Angolan-born, Lisbon-raised artist brilliantly fuses his Angolan heritage with the atmosphere of Lisbon’s clubs. His creative palette is vast, drawing on radio, visual art, installation, performance, and pure rhythm.
His 2012 debut album, Batida, was composed of 1970s Angolan carnival loops and funk samples. The record introduced a vocabulary built on hybrid beats that negotiates the spaces between the archive and the contemporary framework. His live performances activated this vocabulary in physical space through bodily choreography and audiovisual collision.
In 2014, Dois extended this particular vernacular. Recorded in a garage studio on the outskirts of Lisbon, the album brought together collaborators across African and European contexts. The project advanced Batida’s method as a spatial and sonic strategy for reorganizing Lusophone cultural flows.
In 2016, Konono Nº1 Meets Batida marked another shift. The Congolese ensemble’s electrified likembés were subjected to minimal editing. The textures were volatile, built on tension over resolution, and foregrounded distortion as a historical trace of dissonant inheritances.
In 2021, the project got even deeper when he teamed up with Angolan activist and rapper Luaty Beirão under the name IKOQWE. Their intense album, The Beginning, the Medium, the End and the Infinite, really pushed Batida's exploration into heavy topics like digital spying, resource extraction, and what it feels like to be displaced. He kept those themes going in 2022 with Neon Colonialismo, which had a more stripped-down sound and featured artists like Mayra Andrade, Nástio Mosquito, Poté, DJ Dolores, and Bonga.
That same year, he projected his film O Princípio, O Meio, O Fim e o Infinito onto Lisbon’s Monument to the Discoveries. In 2017, he premiered The Almost Perfect DJ. It was a performance and lecture all rolled into one, mixing elements of radio, stand-up comedy, and a manifesto. The piece examined the DJ's role as a cultural gatekeeper while playfully tearing down the idea that some art is "better" than others.
Batida Apresenta: Neon Colonialismo has since evolved into a monthly Worldwide FM radio show that weaves together Afro-Latin sonic dialogues. Morna, semba, funaná, and house are brought together, with each broadcast a cultural essay. In 2018, Coquenão took this ethos further by creating a temporary FM station during Lisbon’s Festival Silêncio.
In academia, scholars have increasingly analyzed Batida DJ's work as a current expression of postcolonial media praxis. His work is often explored through the lenses of sonic historiography and remediation politics. Considering Batida's output, one could say he is celebrated for an intermedial practice that fits within broader studies of Latin culture in motion.
On New Year’s Eve, Pedro Coquenão brings Batida to Control Club. While the night may mark the start of a new year, his music resists the convenient simplicity of a "clean slate". Instead, the transition will remind us that every new beginning is shaped by its history.
