Monday, May 02, 2005  

Konono No. 1
"Mungua-Mungua"
Zaire: Musiques Urbaines a Kinshasa
(Ocora, 1985; rec. 1978)

This is the first recorded work of Konono No. 1 to reach the West. It was provided to me by Peter over at Worldly Disorientation, who got it dubbed from a friend who owns a cassette of Zaire: Musiques Urbaines a Kinshasa on the French ethnographic label Ocora. The out-of-print comp features recordings of four bands from the region doing the matanga mumba-jumba, though none of them have the ramped-up intesity and heatwave distortion of Konono No. 1. (But it's tite how Orchestre Bambala uses an accordion as the lead instrument instead of the likembe.)

And, yeah, in 1978 Konono sounds exactly like they do now. Glad all of us finally got to catch up.

Because this jam is 29-minutes long, and I didn't want to edit it or blowout my bandwidth, I ripped it at a still fine 96 kbps. Konono is all about low-fi insanity anyway, and before you got all hi-fi fancy and started wearing pants in public, you used to listen to Siltbreeze 7-inches, right?

Some Konono-related links:
-Here's the Web site for Congotronics producer Vincent Kenis, who documented his extensive travels though the Kinshasa region.
-Crammed Discs now has a blog.

More Konono links on the Suburbs:
-Interview with Vincent Kenis.
-Links to reviews and places to purchase Konono's two CDs.
-A video and more videos.

Nugget: Producer John King and Medeski, Martin & Wood are down with Zaire: Musiques Urbaines a Kinshasa because they sample vocals from Orchestre Bana Luya for "Reflector" on last year's End of the World Party (Just in Case). Stream the entire track here.

Posted by CP | Link |

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