The first stop on our acoustic journey is Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our Knops Prototypes traveled halfway across the world to see how they live up to the loudest time in the city: Carnival! Knops’ founder Arjen de Jong lets you experience the sounds of the worlds most beautiful cities. This time: Rio de Janeiro.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Brazil has this amazing emotional ‘being alive energy’. Within Brazil, Rio de Janeiro is a token city for this. Rio is located around an inlet that was mistaken by Portuguese explorers for a river delta. They found this inlet in January, hence the name Rio de Janeiro, River of January.

With a warm climate, dramatic steep rock formations splitting Rio’s neighborhoods, and beautiful white sand beaches, it is easy to see why life is outside not indoors. The beach is a very important place, where all Brazilians are equal.

Impression Rio de Janeiro during Carnival

First impression when arriving into the city during Carnival and I realise something is going on, there is a rumble of cheering people and busyness in the background. The first stop was a little boutique hotel in the neighborhood of Santa Teresa to drop of the bags.

Santa Teresa is located on a hilltop overlooking other neighborhoods; one can hear the whole city being alive in the distance. Sounds from the lower neighborhood Lapa come together into this wall of cheers and energy.

Walking through the parades

Walking through the parades. During the carnival, there are a huge number of street parades. People take over the streets dressed up, no traffic coming through. You get your beers from one of the many street vendors (i.e. guys with a cooler) and listen to the live bands. Well bands, ‘Bateria’, a bunch of percussion instruments. Glad I brought Knops with me.

Another parade had something that looked like a semi-truck transformed into an XXL sound system. As these trucks crawl through the street and get closer, I turned the volume down two notches. Man, you can feel the samba music as wind gusts!

The street parades were awesome, but now next stop is the Sambodromo. It is like a stadium stretched out along a wide street. This is official the place where different ‘schools’ are competing for the best parade. And boy, do they go all out! Dutch carnival is nothing compared to these contraptions. Each school gets 90 minutes to show off their best. It all started 10 pm and went on till 5 am. The oldest school originated in the 1920’s, and you can feel there is such pride in participating in the school. All the people were very warm, inviting and friendly, I had a great time.

Experiment successful 🙂

Written by Arjen de Jong.