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TechnoratiAfro electro
Damon Albarn’s electro Congo
Kinshasa One Two, trying to keep one step ahead
Propel Africa into the future instead of rehashing the past: that’s the principle that Damon Alban has tried to develop with Kinshasa One Two, an album by the DRC Music collective, made up of Western producers and Congolese musicians. The intention is commendable and clearly sincere, but tends to get tangled in its own web.
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Damon Albarn has excelled at doing the musical splits for some time. Only someone with rare flexibility can move from Blur’s rock to the cartoon hip hop-electro world of Gorillaz. True to form, “the busiest man in British music” as a BBC presenter once called him, has again quickly followed one project with something completely different. Last July, a few days after leaving Manchester where he presented his new opera Dr Dee about a sixteenth-century scholar, he set off for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With him were a dozen producers specializing in a very specific kind of electro music, some of them instrumentalists and others live performers, but all on a quest to unearth the ultimate sound.
Mission: record an album with local artists. Preparation: none. Length of stay in Kinshasa: about 100 hours. Clearly no time for procrastination, more like focusing on inspiration, improvisation, and that magic that that can’t be produced to order any more than it can be explained, but that needs to be captured and channelled as soon as it emerges. Ostensibly, this new episode in the annals of North-South coming-togethers has the stuff of a violent, full-on cultural shock, even though all the members of the DRC Music team, wherever their roots, tried to dialogue and exchange.
Kinshasa One Two
The project manager Damon Albarn, conscientious supervisor that he is, claims he took great care not offend the values of his Congolese partners. Over the years, he has dabbled with African music: he produced Amadou & Mariam’s 2008 single Sabali, and ran the Africa Express concept, an informal multinational collective with patchy results. Back in 2002 he made a splash with the CD Mali Music following a voyage to Bamako commissioned by Oxfam. The high-profile NGO is also at the root of Kinshasa One Two, and profits from sales will be used to support its humanitarian action.
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In this sprint-like adventure, working method was of the essence, and involved encouraging meetings and fostering an atmosphere in which everyone could feel at ease. Plus one extra, rather large obstacle in the shape of a language barrier! Half an hour after arriving in the Congolese capital, Albarn’s gang were treated to a full-on performance by the Tout Puissant Mukalo band, rising stars on the Kinshasa scene. The deal was a first recording reproduced in Hallo, but all that remains is a sample covered up by the British singer’s melodica in a disturbing atmosphere of dub.
Elsewhere, the sauce is a bit less thick and the traditional aspect manages to shine through in places, like on We Come From The Forest with the Pygmy group Bokatola System, who feature on four of the fourteen tracks. There are no national stars on the album, but mostly musicians with some kind of underground reputation. The guardian of the rap temple, Bebson, manages to emerge largely unscathed, unlike Jupiter Bokondji – discovered in 2004 in the remarkable documentary La Danse de Jupiter – who is reduced to a muffled burbling after being churned through the special effects machine. The taste that you’re left with is a parade of walk-on parts in a hybrid show.
DRC Music Kinshasa One Two (Warp) 2011
Translation: Anne-Marie Harper
