Review: Konono No. 1 - Congotronics (or) the icing on the branches
Posted on 22 January 2006 | 3 Comments
Filed Under: Album Reviews, World Music
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If you have never heard the music of Konono No.1 stop whatever you are doing and download this track. They make some of the most strangely mesmerizing music I’ve ever heard. The music sounds like it was scooped fresh from the pot that contained earth’s primordial soup.
Konono No.1 was founded some 25 years ago by Mawangu Mingiedi in the Kinshasa area on the Congo/Angola (formerly Zaire) border, and is steeped in traditional Bazombo trance music. They use a combination of three amplified likembes (thumb pianos) pitched to bass, middle, and treble along with a collection of makeshift percussion instruments constructed from (among other things) hubcaps, pots, pans, and scrap metal.
What makes them even more interesting is that in order to hear their music over the din of the city streets, Mingiedi created his own lo-fi system. He built pick-ups for the likembes from magnets salvaged from old car parts, wooden microphones (for the call and response chanting), and plugged them all into home-made amplifiers powered by car batteries and megaphones left behind by Belgian colonists.
Vincent Kenis (a music producer from Brussels) searched out the band in 2000 and discovered it sounded exactly as it did 20 years earlier when he first heard Konono No.1 on a French radio station. He was shocked to find that none of their outdated equipment had been replaced. Kenis recorded Congotronics outdoors using an Apple laptop and a few microphones and mixed the entire thing in his hotel room with members of the band. You can read more detailed version of that story here.
The results are oftentimes harsh and otherworldly trance-inducing percussive jams that have almost as much in common with modern experimental electronic music as they do with traditional African music. Congotronics is out now on Crammed Discs.
MP3 | Konono No.1 – Lufuala Ndonga Congotronics
Comments
Funny you should mention that Review: Anderegg - Falling Air (or) no image available
Its amazing the instraments they use and the talent that they have. I wrote a bit on them awhile back as well. My post on it.