Rui “DJ Riot” Pité has one simple hope for Buraka Som Sistema’s Vancouver debut. “We want naked people on-stage,” he says, on the line from Lisbon. “If you’re having fun, that’s what we want.”

If that seems an unlikely objective, consider this: it’s already happened in Scandinavia, where the Portuguese quartet’s rhythm-intensive barrage of live and sampled music, homemade video projections, and dramatic lighting effects wowed Swedish crowds on a recent tour.

“They went completely mad,” Pité reports.

If the percussionist, DJ, and producer sounds both gratified and relieved, that’s understandable. Portugal is hardly a hotbed of pop innovation, and Pité agrees that, up until recently, Lisbon scenemakers were more intent on following international trends than charting their own cultural path. That’s changing, though, with Buraka Som Sistema leading the way through its genre-bending mash-ups of dance-music styles ranging from house to hip-hop. And at the root of the ensemble’s style is a sound that has rarely been heard outside of Portugal and its former African colonies: kuduro, which has its roots in Luanda, the capital city of Angola.

“Kuduro started more or less around ’96, maybe ’95,” Pité explains. “It was created in Luanda, and it started out as, like, African kids being influenced by some techno and some house tracks. But it was never ”˜world music’: it started in the computer, and it stayed there. Its evolution was totally digital; it’s kind of like an African approach to techno and house music.”

At home, Pité and his colleagues—João “Li’l John” Barbosa, Andro “Conductor” Carvalho, and Kalaf Angelo—are often credited with revolutionizing the kuduro genre, but they’re somewhat sceptical of the honour.

“We don’t really like that at all, because kuduro is very new; it’s not like some ancient roots music from Angola,” Pité notes. “We’re just putting our own influences into the kuduro matrix. I mean, I’m a drum ’n’ bass producer, John is more a hip-hop guy, Kalaf has a spoken-word thing going on—we have lots of different influences. So we just took those and put them on the one rhythm that no one outside of Portugal and Angola was getting to know. We don’t do kuduro, but we love kuduro—as we love drum ’n’ bass, as we love dubstep, as we love hip-hop, as we love metal.”

The members of Buraka Som Sistema also love to interact with their audience, and not only when it comes to getting nude dancers on-stage. Visit YouTube to check out their call for fan-generated video clips to accompany “Sound of Kuduro”, from Buraka’s debut full-length, Black Diamond.

“One of the things we thought was ”˜What can we do to make people get to know Buraka better?’ ” Pité explains. “So we came up with that idea. We like to think about all this stuff, and it’s an objective that we’ve had since the beginning, to have videos from guys and girls dancing to our tunes, from your cellphone or whatever.”

So far, the results haven’t quite lived up to the band’s expectations. “I’ve only seen one video, and it was completely stupid,” Pité says, laughing. “It was a guy dancing—I think he was American, from New York—in slow motion. And then it had a part with a keyboard picture on it, and it said ”˜Intermission’, but the music just kept on going. And then the guy appeared again. Actually, it was kind of okay, but I hope we get more.”

Buraka Som Sistema plays the Biltmore Cabaret next Friday (April 24).