Describing music as “vibrant” or “effervescent” is often cliché and patronising. But after a decade, Congotronics still sounds as though the listener is strolling through the studio, drowning in the structured chaos of the Congolese band’s inimitable debut. For Konono Nº1, the sound is as much a part of the band as the notes, the lyrics or the players.
The homemade amplifiers provide the template for a sound as distinctive as Merry Clayton’s voice crack in Gimme Shelter or a Dilla snare. Now, the band is bringing their aural aesthetics to a three-day residency from January 30th until February 1st at Café Oto in Dalston.
The album is the act of corroded, old machines discovering a new humanity. Congotronics has a singular sound, achieved with the blend of broken beauty, battered belligerence and unconditionally catchy melodies. The sound itself is the discarded rubble of the junkyard finding new ways to thrust itself into spiralling shapes while the tattered history of colonisation and civil war feeds into every static hiss and thumb plucked note.
The specially tuned hand pianos twang and weave amidst the crumbling percussion. Always almost about to fall apart, while at the centre, the one unifying element is the certain and considered hum of the reworked amplifiers. They sound like the engineers Tom Waits has always wanted to hire.
For all of the talk about the rambunctious and engrossing insomniac rust of the recording process, the heart of the music is the way in which a melody line can trickle in and out of the mix at will, reappearing in the audience’s consciousness as though it had never left. Even across songs and albums, one note might seem oddly familiar.
Like finding a new use for an old tool, recognising a familiar piece of ergonomics in a new action. Like hammers that hit nails, cracking nuts at Christmas, or a u-bend wrench pulling bark from a tree trunk, these battery acid recordings sound only like themselves; unlike anything else but made from the most familiar objects around the listener.
Across three days, Konono No. 1 will be filling the room with their own sounds. It is dance music and discovered music. Not discovered like old record crates and pirate radio stations, but discovered by the act of playing. The sound itself is so intrinsically linked – so personable – that the playing and the listening are essential.
If this music existed in a vacuum – as a series of sheet music pamphlets or an instruction manual manifesto – then all that would remain would be an important, imperative and original jazz album.
Recorded as it is, by the players and their machines, the live action of listening to the band brings their humanity right to the forefront. Of all the bands playing in London over the next month, no other is quite so necessary.
The residency lasts from Friday, January 30th until Sunday, February 1st.
