KONONO NO 1
CONGOTRONICS (Crammed Disc Craw 27)

A garage band is a term applied pejoratively to a group of kids who get together to make music, generally badly, in someone's garage. Exhibit A: myself & my school chums. That was the name of our garage band when I was 14. The garage becomes a makeshift studio where the garagistes half hope that the walls will muffle the drumbeats and the inevitable feedback when the guitarist gets too close to the vocal mike or creates an electronic impedance by having frequencies bounce off speakers that are too close together. (While simultaneously hoping that stray girls, strolling by, will hear the music and burst in to find out who's making it!) I believe a whole genre of music made a virtue of such teenage suburban ineptness, starting with Green Day--or was it Nirvana?-- but I am happily oblivious to this whole musical moment having opted to screen it out of my own electronic aural field. I was busy listening to Congolese pop which in time also became numbingly repetitious and imploded, but, as in any culture, there were great thing bubbling under waiting to be heard. In 1987 the esteemed French radio label OCORA issued MUSIQUES URBAINS A KINSHASA. I have two copies of the CD (in case I lose one), and a copy of the cassette (because the cuts are longer). It features four groups, recorded in Kinshasa in 1978, playing garage music of a previously unheralded type. First, you have to picture a garage in Kinshasa. There are no Marshall amps, no Fender guitars, just a lot of old car parts. No matter: there are batteries, bits of wire, hubs and rims, even some small speakers in the door of a clapped-out jalopy. With such materials Orchestre Tout Puissant Likembe Konono Numero Un (as they were styled in 1978) created a raw ragged sound that as is grunge as you wanna be. They electrified thumb pianos with contact mikes made of magnets wrapped in copper foil, wired to car batteries that were attached to salvaged speakers. Singers use megaphones to be heard over the din of treble, contralto and bass electric likembes.

The percussionists beat on assorted car parts (muffler cowbells, hubcap cymbals) and create a groove that won't quit and is audible over the urban hubbub. An interesting aside is the sound of the electrified likembe which attains a buzzing sonority that was foreshadowed in many acoustic models. I have a beautiful thumb piano made from a solid piece of wood, hollowed out with a hot poker, that I traded a T-shirt to an Mbuti pygmy for in 1983. There are small metal rings o nthe tines between the two bridges of the instrument that rattle and create a buzzing distortion akin to a loudspeaker with blown cones. There's no way this pygmy chap ever heard amplified music, other than from a transistor radio owned by a passing bigmy (as we styled the normal-sized forest dwellers), but the insect buzz was an integral part of the sound. Konono has gone one step further into distortion favoured by garage bands once they discover tube screamers and similar effects. After 25 years Konono made it to the infamous Paradiso Club in Amsterdam and soon were signed to Crammed Disc for a debut CD that is brilliant. It's the first in a projected series of bush electronica and bodes well for renewed traditions in African pop music. The origin of Konono's sound is in trance music of the Bazombo peoples, a group that spans the Congo and Angolan frontiers. On moving from the bush to the city, the singers, dancers and musicians brought their social roles as well as their traditions. This music is guaranteed to be heard by their ancestors on high. -- Doctor Rhythm