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Brazil's From House To Disco talk new EP on Eli Iwasa's Heels Of Love imprint, the 'Do You Ever Wonder' EP
From House To Disco began in 2018, after you’d both already spent years DJing independently. What did each of you bring from your individual musical backgrounds that eventually became the identity of the project, and how has that relationship changed after almost a decade of playing together?
From the start, From House to Disco was a very natural mix of the two of us: our personalities, tastes, research and references. We never tried to iron out those differences to arrive at one single sound. If anything, that mix became one of our biggest strengths.
Because we’re a couple and built FHTD so closely together, there was always trust to experiment. Livia was really into house from Chicago, New York and Italy, as well as disco. Bruna leaned more towards Detroit, but also had a strong connection to Berlin and was flirting with techno and minimal. We each had our own comfort zone, but we were always encouraging the other to step into new territory.
You can really hear that in the way we play together. There’s a lot of back-and-forth: one of us throws something out, the other takes it somewhere else. It keeps things moving.
Over time, we’ve become more and more in sync. It’s a bit like dancing with someone: at some point, you stop thinking about the steps and your body just knows what to do.
The new EP moves quite freely between classic house, deep house, nu disco and acid without ever feeling tied to one particular corner of the dancefloor. Is that freedom between styles something you consciously protect with From House To Disco, particularly at a time when artists can feel increasingly pressured to establish a very identifiable sound?
Yes, we protect that freedom. Not as a statement against genre, but because that’s simply how we listen to and make music. For us, genre is a starting point, never a fence.
From House to Disco’s identity isn’t about repeating the same formula. It’s in the sounds we choose, the instruments, the way we programme drums, the kind of groove we’re after and the energy we want to create. That’s what connects a deeper track to something more acid or more disco.
There’s a strong sense of house music history running through Do You Ever Wonder, particularly on the title track, but it doesn’t feel nostalgic. When you’re in the studio, how do you draw on the language of classic house while making sure the result still belongs to the present?
We keep a lot of the sound and aesthetic of that era, but our own touch really comes through in the way we shape those sounds. That’s where the result starts to feel more current.
The Lately Bass is a good example. We have an original Yamaha TX81Z in the studio, but working with that sound directly on the hardware is just as limited and time-consuming as it was in the ’90s. With today’s VSTs, you can get into that same sonic territory while having much more control over every aspect of the sound. That’s how we bring a classic reference into the present.
Brazil has always had an incredibly rich relationship with dance music, but the scene seems to be enjoying particularly strong international visibility at the moment. Having played everywhere from smaller underground parties to Time Warp, DGTL, Lollapalooza and Rock in Rio, how do you see the Brazilian electronic scene from the inside right now? And is there something distinctive about Brazilian dancefloors that international audiences perhaps don’t fully understand?
From the inside, we see a scene that has a much clearer sense of itself and isn’t afraid to make space for its own thing. There’s a real desire not to just be a market consuming what comes from abroad, but to take inspiration from it, create its own references and feed them back into the world.
That boldness isn’t a trend. It’s part of who we are. This is still a scene built by people making things happen, often from scratch. There’s a collective effort to carve out spaces, grow an audience and keep the whole thing alive.
And that carries through to the dancefloor. People can feel when something comes from a real place, and there’s genuine pride in being part of it.
Last year you were entrusted with the first official remix of Fernanda Abreu’s “Garota Sangue Bom”, thirty years after the original appeared on Da Lata. That’s a significant piece of Brazilian dance-pop history to be handed. What did that record mean to you growing up, and how did you approach reworking something with so much cultural history without losing what made the original special?
That boldness we were just talking about is Fernanda Abreu in a nutshell. She was making dance music at a time when that wasn’t such an obvious lane in Brazil, mixing samba, rap and electronic music without waiting for anyone to tell her it made sense. And she did it all with a signature that was completely her own.
For us, she has always been proof that Brazilian music can be pop, sophisticated, danceable and totally original at the same time. So getting to work with her so closely was really special.
When we started the remix of “Garota Sangue Bom”, we had one simple rule: don’t cut the vocal. Her voice, the lyrics, the way she sings it, that’s the soul of the track. It would have been a crime to mess with that.
So we worked on everything around it: the arrangement, the drums, the way the track moves on a dancefloor. We brought in a more Miami bass-inspired drum programme, which really connects with Fernanda’s own world, along with some ’90s house piano and organ parts that respond to the vocal, fill the spaces between phrases and almost cue the next line. The idea was to give the track a new pulse without taking away what makes “Garota Sangue Bom” what it is.
Your music has now travelled well beyond Brazil, with releases for the likes of Razor-N-Tape and Definitive Recordings and appearances at ADE and across Europe. Has spending time on dancefloors outside Brazil changed the music you make, or has it actually made you more conscious of the Brazilian perspective you bring to house and disco?
It’s a bit of both. Moving through different cultural contexts and dancefloors broadens our musical vocabulary, but it also sharpens our sense of perspective. We get a clearer sense of where we can step in with real credibility, where we can push things further, and where we need to carve out a space of our own.
“Strobe Heart” feels like the most explicitly peak-time moment on the new record, while “Night Frequency” is more hypnotic and open-ended. When the two of you are producing together, are you imagining specific moments in a DJ set and building tracks to fulfil them, or do those identities only become apparent once the music starts taking shape?
We never go into the studio thinking, “we need a track for this exact moment in a set.” Usually, we come in inspired by something and let the music show us where it wants to go.
“Strobe Heart”, for example, was sparked by a Victor Calderone set we heard. It had that ’90s tribal energy. We wanted to bring some of that enveloping heat into our own language, without thinking about whether it would be a peak-time track or where it would sit in a set.
“Night Frequency” came from an exchange with a DJ friend from abroad. We were sharing some unreleased music, and his sound was more trippy and deep. We got curious about what that territory would sound like within our own identity.
So those identities tend to reveal themselves during the process. There’s always an initial spark, a reference or a desire to try something different, but the track finds its own place while we’re making it.
From House To Disco originally grew out of the simple pleasure of the two of you playing records together at home, and it has since taken you onto major festival stages and increasingly international labels. With Do You Ever Wonder marking another step forward, what still excites you about doing this together, and where would you like to take the project next?
It’s incredibly rewarding to share all of this with the person you love. For all that has changed, we’re still Livia and Bruna who started out with the simple pleasure of playing records together at home. We still do exactly that today, while figuring out the household, the dogs and, now, tours and releases.
We do it all together, and we throw ourselves into it. It’s exciting to know that something we talk about in our kitchen can turn into a track, a festival show, a partnership or a tour.
We want to keep going like this, staying true to who we are wherever we are, whether that’s Brazil or Europe (Spoiler alert!).