Bleep

Congotronics was first born in the mid 1970's by likembe (African thumb piano) master Mawangu Mingiedi (now in his late seventies) on the borders of The Democratic Republic Of Congo and Angola. These seven compositions represent the first time (on record) Western ears were set alight by this most amazing music. Dutch label Crammed Discs were the carriers of the flame in 2005, bringing Mingiedi and his assortment of talented street musicians into the limelight.

To understand the raw, untamed beauty of what makes Congotronics so vividly beautiful one only has to listen to the opening bars of lead cut ' Lufuala Ndonga'. That glorious sound, a burst of crunched kinetic-noise, is the likembe thrust into overdrive and electrified through the core of metal itself- refashioned car parts are modelled into resonating amplifiers-. At front of sound stage Mingiedi directs three likembe's pitched across the octaves; they spiral like jagged, funky-worms into and apart from one another creating a web of perpetually looping rhythm that is frantic to the point of sheer bliss. Enveloping the melody-machine-clatter is the clang and the clunk of junkyard percussion, of wild whistling - a stuttering, poly-rhythmania, whilst handheld, lo-fidelity megaphones are the clarions of ecstatic chanting, pulling you under into the trance/dance.