| Konono No. 1 - Assume Crash Position
2010
Congotronics series.
Web release - Album not out yet but available as a FLAC release in some online stores.
Brought to you by TQMP
The Quality Music Project
Assume Crash Position" is the new album from Congolese street band Konono No.1, the fourth volume in the Congotronics series from Crammed Discs. It will be released in May/June 2010.
Once again recorded in their home domain of Kinshasa, DR Congo by Congotronics series producer Vincent Kenis, the long-anticipated follow-up to Konono's 2005 debut sees their trademark thrilling junkyard sonics and relentlessly hypnotic percussive grooves (as created using thumb pianos and drums made from scrap metal and disused car parts) further elevated with electric guitars and bass - played by neighbourhood musicians from a young Konono covers band! - as well as a wider range of vocalists plus guest appearances from guitarist Manuaku Pepe Felly (Zaпko Langa Langa) and members of fellow Congotronics band Kasai Allstars.
The band's music is and will always be a very precise mixture of traditonal bazombo trance music with the distortion of their modern home-made equipment... but their sound on "Assume Crash Position" is somehow deeper, more layered and ethereal, without losing any of that signature raw power and driving energy. Those gloriously extended full band tracks take off like never before - but also, for the first time, we hear Konono stripped right back to their essence: the album's final song, "Nakobala Lisusu Te", features just the band's founder and master, Mingiedi (now in his late-seventies) and his likembe. "I don't feel like getting married any more", he sings in sweet and mournful tones, "because women nowadays think marriage is just a six month affair".
The album title is a rough translation from the Kikongo meaning of "Konono", and if you've heard or seen the band in full flight before you'll have some idea of the ride you're in for here. If not - well, strap yourselves in...
Assume Crash Position will be coming out on CD... and also on vinyl, only as part of the limited-edition 7-vinyl Congotronics Vinyl Box Set, only available on pre-order from the Crammed online store
-- crammed.be
"A blend of traditional Bazombo folk with gritty sound distortions that would make Jimi Hendrix proud... Dizzying, danceable and frenetic..."
-- Newsweek, USA
"Sounds like no other type of African music... The sophisticated brutality of Konono No. 1 leaves permanent traces in the conscience of the listener"
-- Les Inrockuptibles, France
"A hallucinatory sonic world, simultaneously evocative of avant-garde rock and electro-acoustic experimentation... areas which are of course totally alien to the members of Konono
-- Libйration, France
"Once in a while an album comes along which is so insanely wonderful..."
-- All About Jazz, USA
"Every so often there comes a record of such unlikeliness, of such overpowering rhythmic intensity and such majestic indifference to global musical trends that you're knocked sideways. This is one of them. Search where you will in rock and hip-hop, you won't find a more viscerally exciting album this year"
-- Daily Telegraph, UK
"Somewhere between the motorik Kraut-rock repetition of prime Can, a Brazilian carnival and pre-historic acid house"
-- The Word, UK
Tracks
01- Wumbanzanga
02- Thin Legs
03- Mama Na Bana
04- Makembe
05- Fula Fula
06- Guiyome
07- Konono Wa Wa Wa
08- Nakobala Lisusu Te
Audio format: FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
http://flac.sourceforge.net/index.html
Enjoy, seed and inhale!
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Pastafari Cubensis
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