Category: Arts & Culture

Konono No. 1, a 12-piece street band from Kinshasa, arrives in Pittsburgh TONIGHT!!!! at The Warhol Museum. The show starts at 8pm and tickets are $10.

From this is happening:

Using homemade “Congotronics”, electro effects, amplified thumb pianos, and makeshift percussion from pots, pans, and car parts, these unique musicians fuse traditional rhythms and homemade trance sounds in a mix that’s earned acclaim from both electronica and world music fans.

Konono No. 1, led by the septuagenarian Mawangu Mingiedi, performs in outdoor cafes in Kinshasa, Congo. To make its traditional trance music heard above the roar of the traffic-choked streets, it amplifies its toylike likembés, or thumb pianos, using pick-up microphones made from the magnets in car alternators and loudspeakers left behind by Belgian colonists in 1960. The squalling feedback this lo-fi system produces is worked into the polyrhythmic drumming and call-and-response chanting to create a brutal, neotraditional genre Kinshasa’s musicians call tradi-moderne.

“When I encountered it, I thought it was the equivalent of punk music in Africa,” said Vincent Kenis, a Brussels-based producer who first heard Konono No. 1 on a French radio station in 1980. ” From then it took me 10 years to go to Kinshasa and look for them and another 10 years to find them.” He finally tracked down the band in 2002 and discovered it sounded just as it had 20 years before: no equipment had been replaced.