Konono No1 / The Dead C

Split #18

the eighteenth 12” in our split series, Konono No.1 v The Dead C presents two groups whose music, whilst stylistically very different, is strongly based upon live performance and upon the raw power of distortion and amplification.

Hailing from The Democratic Republic of The Congo, Konono No.1 marks FatCat’s first release of an artist from the African continent. Rooted in a very social form of folk music making, the group are one of the main exponents of a spectacular style of music which has developed in the suburbs of the capital city of Kinshasa. The Congolese refer to this style as "tradi-modern", meaning electrified traditional music. These are musicians who have left the bush to settle in the capital and, in order to both continue fulfilling their social role and make themselves heard above the urban din, they have resorted to DIY amplification of their instruments, and the use of megaphones. This makeshift electrification provoked a radical mutation of their sound, introducing distortions that they have then integrated into their style.

Konono No.1 was founded over 25 years ago by Mingiedi, a virtuoso of the likembé (a traditional instrument sometimes called "sanza" or "thumb piano", consisting of metal rods attached to a resonator). 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. The rhythm section uses both traditional and makeshift percussion (pans, pots, car parts), 3 singers, 3 dancers and a sound system. The musicians come from an area which sits right across the border between Congo and Angola. Whilst their repertoire draws largely on Bazombo trance music, the incorporation of originally-unwanted distortions arising through their sound system has led to them developing a unique style which has accidentally connected them with the aesthetics of the most experimental forms of rock and electronic music, as much through their sounds as through their sheer volume (they play in front of a wall of speakers) and merciless grooves.

The two tracks on this split were kindly licensed to us by the Crammed Discs label, who released the Konono No1 album, 'Congotronics' in February 2005.

You can watch an amazing live video of Konono here

Formed in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1987 by guitarists Michael Morley and Bruce Russell, and drummer Robbie Yeats, The Dead C have released nearly 20 albums and overcome geographical isolation to connect with and inspire a legion of fans and like-minded operators, becoming in the process little short of a legendary presence. They have influenced a broad range of bands, from the drifting post-rock of Flying Saucer Attack and Labradford to the neo-psychedelia of Bardo Pond to lo-fi indie-rockers like Pavement and Sebadoh (with whom they collaborated on a 7” in 1993). Cited as one of Sonic Youth’s favourite bands, their own highly distinctive take on improvised free noise / experimental rock is an ever-mutating explosion / implosion of blissful guitar / electronic noise chunks and splatter-rhythms.

The Dead C have always had an honest and critical attitude to recording, viewing multitrack recording as ‘technical fakery’: “Music's primarily instrumental, human beings actually play music in a room together and you record it. I can't see why, in order to make an audible record of that, you would want to have the human beings do their bits separately and then patch them together to make a representation of what it might have sounded like if they'd all been playing together in a room at the same time. I profoundly find that a weird way to go... The sound that people make together in a room playing, to me that's what recording ought to be about.” (Bruce Russell). Yet this approach has often wrongly been described as lo-fi, whereas Russell explains “my amp makes a storm of noise even at rest. People mistake that for a hissy recording. No, it's a very clear recording of a very hissy sound and that's something people have trouble grasping. There’s no reason why the kind of strategy I'm talking about needs to be lo-fi, it's not about trying to record badly, on the contrary, I'm very interested in recording sounds faithfully…”

Besides playing in The Dead C, Bruce Russell has also run his own labels, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum, has played alongside Alastair Galbraith in A Handful Of Dust, and has released 3 solo albums. Michael Morley also plays in Gate – another seminal NZ outfit, whilst Robbie Yeats was a former member of 1980’s Dunedin pop band, The Verlaines.

The Dead C’s side of this Split 12” opens with five locked-groove slices of molten, lava-fold noise. Whilst the 2 later tracks witness the trio in live meltdown, the first full track sees a rare-ish return to the band’s earlier methods which see-sawed around a tension between the solidity of the song and the disintegrative logic of free improvisation. Opening with some kind of studio argument / accident, this is a great, sprawling track, blessed by Morley’s mumbled / half-buried vocal. The two live tracks are bootlegged recordings, taken on a minidisk and binaural microphone from within the audience at a rare show in Canterbury University, Christchurch, NZ in August 2003.