“Unwanted distortions:” Konono No. 1 and the essential joys of liner notes
Kinshasa, Congo's Konono No. 1 is a group of complete strangers who want their crowds to dance. That's about as much of an introduction as most newcomers will need when the band plays a free show this Monday at Millennium Park and another, ticketed show Tuesday at the Empty Bottle. But these days, people rarely go into a show blind.
Ikembe (thumb piano) player Mawangu Mingiedi founded Konono sometime in the 1970s. Western musicians―most prominently, Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel―would start trying to re-interpret African music in their own image soon after or around the same time, but that's not when Westerners started hearing about Konono. Instead, most of us heard about this group's propulsive use of ikembe melody and group vocals after Belgian label Crammed Discs put out 2004's Congotronics, the group's first official release.
By then, it wasn't a stretch to mistakenly believe that the distorted, trippy sound of the group's multiple ikembes was some kind of tribute to American electronic music or experimental rock, which by now have taken plenty of liberties with world music. It's not unusual, and not at all untrue to the band's sound, for writers to describe it like this L.A. Times review: “an ideal synthesis between noise, electronic, and African music.” Because most of Konono's new fans will never experience the group's music in its original social context or even understand the language, it's a godsend that producer Vincent Kenis included liner notes on Congotronics and the new follow-up, Assume Crash Position. Though brief, these stories make it clear that Konono's much more resourceful, and mercifully less style-conscious, than your average spoiled twerp with a copy of GarageBand.
No one can blame Americans for wanting to hear familiar elements in a kind of music that derives from a distant cultural tradition, involves long and highly repetitive song structures, and whose lead instruments sound wonderfully peculiar even when recorded cleanly. The ikembe (sometimes called kalimba, mbira, or a dozen other things depending on place and dialect) produces rapid, staccato notes when played right, and touching its bare metal keys for the first time can be just as rough as holding down a guitar string with virgin fingers. Konono's notes struck people as more different still on Congotronics because they're bathed in fuzz, sounding almost blown-out. “These are musicians who left the bush to settle in the capital [Kinshasa] and who, in order to keep fulfilling their social role and make themselves heard by the ancestors (and, more concretely, by their fellow citizens) despite the high level of urban noise, have had to resort to do-it-yourself amplification of their instruments,” the Congotronics liner notes explained. This “accidentally connected them with the aesthetics of experimental rock and electronic music.”
Konono may have scrounged our industrial wreckage to arrive at its sound, but it's crucial to realize this wasn't an act of imitation. Mingiedi and crew were no more “going electronic” than the first Southern transplants who plugged in to create the Chicago blues. Konono's “originally unwanted distortions,” as the notes term them, somewhat ironically derived from the ultimate form of Westerner trash: “The band's lineup includes three electric ikembes (bass, medium, and treble), equipped from hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, and plugged into amplifiers.”
The liner notes for Assume Crash Position go a little more anecdotal, describing a scene in the second-hand car-parts market in which Konono members to this day scour for gear: “Every single morning, all the joints, camshafts, valves, cigar lighters, reflectors, and bolts you see on the pictures are artistically aligned on the floor; every single night they are carefully wiped, packed and locked away in car shells situated nearby, the trunks of which are used as safes.” They also go on to translate the rough themes of the album's Kikongo-language lyrics: “'Fula Fula' means 'very fast' and designates a truck arranged as a bus in order to transport a large number of people. By extension, it also refers to a person who switches very quickly from one sexual partner to the other.”
Of course, liner notes are supposed to fill you with a sense of wonder and admiration. They're a promotional tool. But even more essentially, this decidedly pre-iTunes element of a release extends a certain insider's privilege to the average listener. Go to a record store and flip over any of the shiny new reissued LPs in the jazz section. If you're lucky, you'll get a detailed background on each of the “cats” playing on each session, and a refined interpretation of what they're aiming at, both emotionally and technically. (If not, you might get one of the musicians' friends attempting some kind of modernist poetry.) As more Americans discover world music through the comfy means of NPR, blogs, or The Fader, it becomes extra-important to at least glance over these liner notes when they're offered. They're informative even when brief. They also make you wonder what other feats of innovation musicians pull off to stay active on the most habitually pillaged and neglected of all continents.
