"A.E.I.O.U."

When this funeral band from upper Congo (near the Angolan border) came to the big city of Kinshasa in the 1970s, they plugged their likembes (thumb pianos) into guitar amplifiers to be heard over the din of urban electric guitar bands.  They probably didn’t imagine that the resulting sound—ringing and buzzing with distorted overtones—would one day take them to New York’s Central Park and the performance halls of Europe.  Konono No1 is the group best positioned to trade on the buzz generated by two previous “Congotronics” releases featuring a selection of Kinshasa’s urban-traditional bands.  Under the firm leadership of its founder, Mingiedi, Konono deliver rich, repetitive trance grooves in which mood trumps melody, and groove and sonic texture trump technique, form, or just about any other musical quality.  There are a number of previously unreleased songs on this live set recorded in a Brussels nightclub, but it hardly matters.  What makes this a great record is the way it puts across the confidence and joyful immediacy of the band.  These musicians have grown comfortable on a stage before a crowd of foreigners.  The music was originally intended to lull spirits of the dead merrily into the next world.  It now works equally well to lull jam-band fans into a thrumming, natural high.

There are eight pieces here, although some are joined together so that the change from one song to the next just feels like the band’s ceaseless engine shifting gears.  The likembe jams are the heart of things.  In “A.E.I.O.U.,” the highest-pitched likembe jumps to the fore with playful lyricism, while the bass likembe becomes a blurred layer of distortion that moves in like a storm cloud and leaves bright sunshine in its wake.  Songs unfold in a succession of interlocked likembe parts.  Sometimes, as on “Kule Kule”—the most chilled-out groove in the set—likembes drop out to feature percussion and vocals.  Call-and-response vocal passages sometimes play as cries within the storm.  When featured—as on “Nsimba and Nzunzi” or “Marie Liza”—vocal lines are arranged in stark, parallel harmony, far edgier than the sweetly perfect vocal blend heard in mainstream Congo pop songs, though not so far from the shouted “animation” that often concludes such songs. 

Before a live audience, Konono endlessly recombines its standard bag of tricks, nudging the mood ever upwards.  This recording delivers that emotional trajectory, and is as close to the actual experience of seeing the band live as any recording could be.  2008 promises a new studio album from Konono, and one hopes it will extend the repertoire in new and surprising ways.  For the meantime, this stands as the must-own Konono CD, summing up of the band’s wild ride from village funeral to Belgian nightclub.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org