In Gato Preto’s video for Barulho, the two musicians appear as prisoners who become futuristic heroes. The change is theatrical and emphatic: leather, silver, reflective surfaces and a vehicle imagined for a mission to rescue the world’s grooves. The story belongs to the visual language around Tempo, the Düsseldorf duo’s 2017 debut album. Its soundtrack moves among electronic bass, percussion and vocal forms gathered through travel and collaboration. The imagery offers a comic-book transformation, while the music asks a harder question: who gets to decide what African music ought to sound like now?
Gato Preto means black cat in Portuguese. The duo is producer Lee Bass and singer and rapper Gata Misteriosa. In a 2019 conversation with Afropop Worldwide, Gata called their music Afro-futuristic. She described bringing kuduro, favela funk, Afro-house, African percussion and electronic sounds into a shared production space. Gata came from Mozambique through Portugal to Germany; Lee described himself as Ghanaian and German. Those connections are not a ready-made formula for a track. They are part of a working method in which a beat can become a meeting place for musicians from different cities and histories.
The pair’s music is also a reply to the expectation that an African act should preserve a recognizably traditional sound for a European audience. Gata said they include traditional elements but have no obligation to play only those elements. Lee constructs beats, Gata finds vocal lines and harmonies, and collaborators can change a track’s direction. Their futuristic images make the refusal visible. They appear in a world they have built themselves, rather than as exhibits of someone else’s idea of authenticity.
Time as a shared instrument
Tempo is Portuguese for time. The title of the album is apt for a group whose sound assembles rhythms that have travelled at different speeds and through different routes. The 2017 release listing includes A Luta Continua, Moçambique, Dia D, Tempo, Pirão, Feitiço, Puxa, Polícia, Pé na Roda, Barulho, Take a Stand and Televisão. The sequence moves between political address, named places, movement and noise. It offers more than one register of listening before a listener reaches the end of the record.
In a Bandcamp Daily interview, Gata explained that time is not simply the neutral flow of years. Historical exploitation continues in new forms, and a record made after years of travel also stores its makers’ experiences. That double meaning gives the album its charge. A track can belong to a contemporary dance floor and still carry an awareness that a past injustice has not finished. The body moves in the present, but the sound brings other moments into the room.
The album was released by Unique Records in 2017, several years after the pair began working together in Düsseldorf. Its artist-published tracklist includes guests who widen the record’s geography. Feitiço credits Flore and MC Zulu; Polícia features Delasi; Pé na Roda includes Diamondog; Barulho brings in Edu K; and Take a Stand features Crooked Bois and Iche. These are not merely decorative names attached to a finished product. Gato Preto’s account of their practice describes a process in which a collaborator may hear a beat differently and give it an unexpected social or rhythmic meaning.
Lee gave one example in the Afropop interview. In Cape Verde, collaborators heard an association with Mandinga carnival in a beat he brought. They recorded vocals, and the pair later added guitar. The track Mendinga Carnival emerged from that exchange. The story is useful because it complicates the familiar image of a producer collecting samples from elsewhere. Here the local musicians named what they heard and altered the composition. The beat became a site of interpretation, with its final shape dependent on people whose knowledge the visitors did not arrive with.
That method has a political edge without pretending that every collaboration eliminates unequal power. Lee and Gata are artists with their own decisions to make; the Cape Verdean performers were not anonymous raw material. Their account makes the process audible as an encounter. It also shows why the term Afrofuturistic can mean more than metallic clothing or synthesizer effects. A future-oriented African music can be made through the terms on which people share authorship across a diaspora and across the continent.
The visual world of Barulho
The Barulho video gives the duo’s Afrofuturist imagery a narrative task. As Bandcamp Daily described the film, Gata and Lee change from captives into heroes who confront a villain trying to control the world’s grooves. The premise is knowingly extravagant. Music is treated as something powerful enough to seize, defend and release. A viewer can enjoy the costumes and chase while recognizing the underlying idea that a rhythm is never simply a neutral commodity.
The story’s transition from captivity to action matters. The musicians are first placed in a condition defined by someone else, then gain the ability to move and intervene. It is an image of creative agency, and it echoes the pair’s account of being asked where they belong or what they should sound like. Their answer is to invent a world in which they are the agents of transformation. The move does not erase the ordinary problems named in their songs, but it changes the position from which those problems are faced.
The video’s steampunk and science-fiction elements also avoid the idea that a future has to be smooth or clean. Leather, metal and makeshift transport suggest a built environment assembled from available parts. That roughness suits the duo’s musical process, where a club beat, a live percussion pattern and a guest’s vocal idea can meet without being sanded down into a single genre. The visual universe has seams, as does the record. Those seams are part of its energy.
Gato Preto’s own SoundCloud presentation points to Barulho as a particularly noticed video and invokes earlier Afrofuturist performance figures including George Clinton and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Across their distinct sounds, these performers share a willingness to use heightened persona, technology and sonic experiment to make Black cultural agency impossible to overlook. Gato Preto’s costumes are a contemporary part of that lineage, while their rhythms and languages come from their own collaborative routes.
The word barulho can be translated as noise. In the duo’s hands noise is a way of claiming space. Bass can be felt through a body before a lyric is understood; a bright costume can register before the story behind it is explained. Those first impacts draw people toward a work that contains more than spectacle. The pleasure of the surface is not a trick used to smuggle in a serious subject. It is one of the ways the subject is lived, with play and critique occurring together.
What Gata and Lee each bring
In their Afropop conversation, Gata and Lee gave a rare account of the negotiation inside a duo. Lee may begin with a beat, but Gata has to feel that she can inhabit it on stage. She may develop lyrics, contribute to composition and build vocal harmonies. Lee singled out her harmonic work on material they were making after Tempo. The division is therefore not simply producer behind the machinery, singer in front of it. Each listens for what a composition is missing, and a track may change when one of them refuses an easy answer.
That refusal can be as important as an added instrument. Gata said that a beat which does not speak to her cannot become a convincing performance merely because it works technically. A group known for high-energy concerts depends on the performer’s commitment to the material. The music’s public force begins in a private test of whether its makers believe in it. Lee, meanwhile, described wanting to expand beyond the tougher beats of the first album into arrangements with more complex chords and multiple voices. Their shared interest is in development, not repetition of a recognisable brand.
The pair’s live configuration has included Senegalese percussionist Moussa Diallo. Their 2017 WOMEX showcase listing names Lee on keyboard and synthesizer, Gata on vocals and percussion, and Diallo on percussion. The duo’s own album page describes Diallo’s djembe as part of the live sound. This is a meeting of electronic sequencing and hand-played rhythm. Neither element is asked to certify the other as more African or more modern. They meet in a concert where bodies can answer both.
The duo’s stage clothing extends the composition into space. The WOMEX description foregrounds their post-apocalyptic science-fiction visuals; the video suggests how the costumes help turn musicians into characters within a self-made world. Live, such clothing gives the audience a point of entry before they can separate one rhythm source from another. Movement, percussion, voice, bass and fabric arrive together. Gato Preto’s Afrofuturism is therefore not only a genre claim attached to recordings. It is a performance language, built from the whole encounter.
Lyrics that remain in the present
Gata’s explanation of the lyrics complicates the duo’s futuristic imagery. She said the subjects are ordinary social realities: women’s rights, education, police violence, poverty and abuse. A space-age costume does not make those matters remote. It can change how an audience approaches them. Someone who has arrived to dance may hear a phrase that stays with them after the set. The distance opened by fantasy becomes a route back to the present.
Polícia, a track featuring Delasi on Tempo, shows that directness in the album’s titles. The word needs no invented future setting to be urgent. Placed among dance tracks and collaborations, it suggests that movement and political attention can coexist. Take a Stand makes a related demand through its title, while Televisão points toward the media environment in which public stories are circulated. These titles alone do not establish the full meaning of their lyrics, yet the pair’s own account of their concerns gives the sequence a discernible social horizon.
Lee argued that listeners need not understand every lyric to encounter the music. If they do not speak the language, they can still dance; if they listen further or watch the videos, another level becomes available. This is a practical account of a multilingual touring act, but it also describes a generous artistic structure. A song does not demand the same entrance from every listener. Rhythm is one doorway, language another, image a third. None is a lesser version of the work.
The approach resists a false choice between entertainment and commitment. Gato Preto does not ask the dance floor to become a lecture hall. Nor do they treat serious subjects as incompatible with pleasure. Gata described the extravagant visual world as a way of making people look and then think. That sequence respects the power of performance: an image can catch attention first, while a question may take longer to form.
A future with many places in it
The duo’s geographical story could easily be reduced to a list of nationalities. Their own account suggests a richer map. Gata’s route from Mozambique through Portugal to Germany, Lee’s Ghanaian and German family history, and the participation of musicians from Senegal, Cape Verde and elsewhere do not merge into a single origin. They create a network of relationships. The music’s claim to a future comes partly from refusing the idea that an African cultural form must belong to only one place or one time.
Lee spoke in the Bandcamp Daily interview about being asked where he was from in Germany, and about a later visit to Ghana that altered his sense of his roots. That account matters to the records because the sound is made by someone who cannot treat identity as a simple answer supplied by a passport. Gato Preto’s music can hold a German electronic-club context and Ghanaian or Mozambican relationships without arranging them into a hierarchy of authenticity.
The pair’s openness to collaborators beyond African backgrounds also follows from this position. Gata said the project is African in its movement and self-understanding, while production can involve musicians from Brazil, Russia, France, South Africa or Colombia. That openness is not a claim that all differences are interchangeable. It is a refusal to seal African creativity behind a border drawn by the marketplace. If a new sound changes a track in a way the duo finds alive, it can become part of their vocabulary.
There is a useful connection here with Krull’s conversation about futuristic dreams in the Congo diaspora. Images of the future are made from situated experiences, not from a universal template of shiny machines. Gato Preto approaches that question through collective music-making. Their futuristic costumes may be the first thing a viewer remembers, but the record underneath them is a document of people exchanging ideas across languages, stages and studios.
Tempo remains the clearest statement of the pair’s method. Its name points simultaneously to tempo as pulse and tempo as time. Its tracks make room for political subjects, guests, multilingual voices and moments designed simply to move a crowd. Barulho gives the project a hero story, but the rescue it imagines begins in the very act of making the music. A groove is not held still as an artifact of origin. It travels, changes hands and comes back charged with the people who shaped it. Gato Preto’s future sounds like that exchange in motion.