It may well be the best thing you will hear this year. It is certainly the best thing you will hear in 2005 which features, among other things, the sound of car parts being banged together along with frantic thumb pianos that will seep into your brain and soundtrack your daydreams.
Even in a year which has already featured some quite splendid albums, Konono No 1's Congotronics, with its manic hisses and rumbles and echoes, stands out a country mile. Listen to it with open ears and you too will be wowed by what you hear. You won't be alone: since its release in February, more and more people have fallen under the spell of those discordant thumb-pianos.
Orchestre Tout Puissant Likembé Konono No 1 de Mingiedi are an outfit who hail from the mean streets of Kinshasa, the swirling, chaotic Congolese capital where anything goes, and they have been making this racket for the last 25 years or so. Originally from the area around the war-torn Congolese/Angolan border, Mawangu Mingiedi and his fellow musicians moved, like so many of the population, to the Kinshasa suburbs in search of a new life. What they brought with them was their take on traditional Bazombo music and a bewildering array of homemade and improvised instruments.
It's how this instrument list has evolved that accounts for the genesis of Konono's compelling rattle. Mingiedi and his bandmates started out initially playing electric thumb-pianos, the traditional likembés with their metal rods. But, when the Kinshasa traffic drowned out their music, they added home-made microphones, megaphones, percussion made from scrap metal and old car parts and makeshift amplification to their arsenal.
What they produce with this McGyver-like bank of instruments is, as you would imagine, something quite bizarre. At times reminiscent of an all-star Krautrock band playing at the Rio carnival or the loudest, weirdest acid house rave of all, this really is something to stop the traffic.
In a musical world which will be dominated for the rest of the year by inevitably predictable Oasis and Coldplay albums, Congotronics, with its psychedelic, primitive hypnotic, distorted trance that appears to have no beginning or end, is a blast of cool, crisp fresh air.
Until now, music from the Congo usually meant the lilting guitar-playing of Franco or the swaying, poppy soukous sounds of Kanda Bongo Man. But that's a pigeonhole which must now expand to include the fiercely punky, funky, hypnotic soundclash which the Konono gang and their fellow Kinshasa suburban warriors are producing.
When it comes to music from other cultures, western audiences are quite selective. For them, certain countries are always associated with certain sounds. Of course, such cultural generalisations help the marketing departments of record labels and retail stores to sell slick, well-packaged, smartly-designed albums. These releases are tailor-made to appeal to audiences who want the exoticisms of other cultures without the gritty issues and socio-economic problems which these musicians might face in their native lands.
Generalisations can also account for why we have this catch-all "world music" term foisted on us to describe music from countries where they don't necessarily listen to Keane or Green Day.
The music produced by Konono No 1 is similar in spirit to that of hundreds of other groups living in new city sprawls throughout the world. In their musical mash-ups, these acts are reflecting the collision and confusion between the old and the new which they see around them every day of the week as the move from traditional to urban continues apace. But, because western music fans look to other cultures only for a certain sound or texture, these acts and their music are being largely ignored in spite of what they represent.
Congotronics, though, cannot be neglected for too long. An album that is as raucous, primal and funky as anything modern rock music can offer, it demands to be heard. Play it loud over and over again on the biggest set of speakers you can get your hands on.
Congotronics is on Crammed Discs. www.crammed.be
