musical link: Congotronics by KONONO N°1
Thanks to Kikuyumoja’s realm for this one.
Congotronics is the debut album by KONONO N°1 formed almost 20 years ago that is now out on Crammed Records.
What’s special and pretty impressive about this group though is that they have pretty much created most if not all of their electonic recording equipment and instruments from scratch themselves or repaired it from salvage.
The band’s line-up includes three electric likembés (bass, medium and treble), equipped with hand-made microphones built from magnets salvaged from old car parts, and plugged into amplifiers. There’s also a rhythm section which uses traditional as well as makeshift percussion (pans, pots and car parts), three singers, three dancers and a sound system featuring these famous megaphones.
They actually made their own patch bays, microphones, percussion instruments including a likembé also called a “sanza” or “thumb piano” made of metal.
Even cooler than all this is that they altered their sound to take advantage of distortional feedback from their home made amps!
There is a video for one of the tracks here. You can also listen to samples of their tracks at allmusic.com(free subscription required).
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 2:20 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response or trackback from your own site.
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Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Dancing to soccer moves, Maasai Hip Hop and laughing at wealthy Americans says:
January 19, 2007, 7:46 am
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[...] Soundroots.org, a site that never fails to educate and entertain has a fantastic world music mp3 collection to bid 2006 adieu. It includes some hiphop by X Plastaz, a group from Tanzania, which fuses Maasai traditional music and urban hip hop and Konono #1 of Congo whom I have blogged about in the past. [...]