Konono N° 1 - Assume Crash Position

  by Maarten Schiethart

published: 30 / 5 / 2010

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Review

This second Konono N° 1 CD is available as a single unit but Congotronic collectors might want to get this album plus the preceding Congotronics albums of the series so far all in one big box with vinyl LPs, videos and digital audio files on a USB stick plus an exclusive 7 inch single. For this extravagant package weighing in at a couple of kilos visit www.crammed.be or annoy the local record store with a very tough inquiry. Konono Numéro Un! And let there be no misconception about it; today's western music relies heavily on what we stole from Africa. Konono N° 1 in their turn assembled unique percussion instruments from steel metal parts found at a tip. 'Assume Crash Position' is more refined in its use of boiling percussion tombola and thumb piano, often taking the place of the sneering electric guitars which gave 'Congotronics',their debut, such punk ethics. The dazzling effect still intact, we now hear an album that may go down like a storm at the Notting Hill Carnival. The Bidonville Kinshasa mayhem that filtered through the punky sound on 'Congotronics' now melts with Kinshasa's soukous. This fast and jiggy variation on the rumba adds more melody to Konono N° 1's tribal trance touch. Bursting with energy on for example the stupendously solid and lean 'Fula Fula', I can imagine dons of the dance, like Tiësto, turning to Konono N° 1 instead of continuing to concentrate on that bleak electronic dance stuff which happens to be called trance. Chicken skin moments of exalted joy and of pure mating rituals, for which dance music after all developed, send shivers down the spine. Kinshasa, and to a lesser extent its extracontinental suburbs Brussels and Paris, is the unlikely metropole where dance music got reinvented. 'Konono Wa Wa Wa' sums it all up. Be it Belgium, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and wherenot; congo- not elec-tronic is how the world should be. Vâchement énorme!

Track Listing:-

1 Wumbanzanga
2 Thin Legs
3 Mama Na Bana
4 Makembe
5 Fula Fula
6 Guiyome
7 Konono Wa Wa Wa
8 Nakobala Lisusu Te

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