Congotronics

Konono No. 1

album cover

From Junkyard Car Parts and Megaphones Comes . . .

At first it sounds like some late-night carousing happening a mile away: There's the steady clatter of metallic percussion and the happy plinking of three likembé thumb pianos. Taunting voices crackle through antique megaphones known as "voice throwers," their cries answered by an insistent police whistle.

There's fuzz all around the sound, and when it's coupled with the call-and-response chanting, the music of the Kinshasha band Konono No. 1 seems almost surreal, a riveting balance of the ancient and the ultramodern. The beats are descended from the trance music of the Bazombo region on the Congolese/Angolan border, the chants are those used in rituals that have been handed down for generations. But those thumb pianos, one supplying bass lines and the other two creating a chordal patchwork, are intriguingly distorted. Bandleader Mawangu Mingiedi, who formed Konono No. 1 in the late '70s, developed a way to make the likembé louder using magnets and homemade amplifiers powered by car batteries. When paired with percussion made from junkyard scraps, the sound of the likembé becomes odd and exotic.

Konono's music thrives on interplay: The more there is going on, the more it feels as though the rhythm could roll forever. The three thumb pianos sometimes crisscross like bike messengers threading a busy intersection, and sometimes line up together for a hardcrunching attack closer to heavy metal than anything African. Congotronics would be captivating even if it were somehow rendered cleanly, but it's the coarseness, and the deft but not quite perfect synchronization of contrasting ideas, that makes it irresistible. Get inside this recording, which works really well loud, and what seemed at first to be an odd street-carnival curiosity becomes utterly hypnotic trance music.

Genre: World, Congo
Released: 2004, Crammed Discs
Key Tracks: "Kule Kule," "Paradiso."
Catalog Choice: Congotronics 2.
Next Stop: Fela and Egypt 80: Beasts of No Nation
After That: Various Artists: Centrafrique: Musique Abaya/Chants a penser.
Book Pages: 431–432