Mbongwana Star, "From Kinshasa"
Rhythms and riffs tempered by and expanded sense of distance, in which even supernovas appear as isolated rebellions against the vast darkness of space.
Last month, I had the opportunity to write about Kinshasa’s contemporary music scene for Bandcamp Daily. Although I tried to include a broad range of artists in or connected to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital city, I had to leave out one of my favorite Congolese bands, for the simple fact that they don’t post their music on Bandcamp. That band is Mbongwana Star, a short-lived, spaceman-themed project developed via a collaboration between two Congolese musical heavyweights, Coco Ngabali and Theo Nzonza, and the French-Irish producer Liam Farrell. Ngabali and Nzonza both came from the internationally acclaimed group Staff Binda Bilili, while Farrell is a veteran producer who’s spent decades working with and around some of Africa’s leading musical minds. Together, they carve out a sound that’s both regional and removed, its brightness bent at the angle of starlight slipping past black holes you can sense but can’t quite see.
Something else I wasn’t able to cover in the Bandcamp piece was the spate of intra-territorial violence that has once again gripped the DRC. Close to my deadline, the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group re-organized and captured the Eastern Congolese cities of Baku and North Kivu, reigniting a civil conflict that had been simmering in the country for three decades. Kinshasa is on the other side of the DRC, but the M23 have been clear they plan to push through to the capital. There’s a lot of fear and chaos in the DRC right now, compounded by acute suffering in the areas where fighting has exacerbated food shortages and other humanitarian crises that were never really solved after past wars in the region. There’s probably some quip here about the resilience of art in the face of adversity, about how Congolese artists continue to create light in the face of a persistently unforgiving reality, but metaphor can only do so much. Mbongwana Star might imagine an extraterrestrial escape, but real life remains tethered to the only Earth we’re given.
Bonus Pick: For more deep-space transmissions, head to Beijing for a sample of Soulspeak’s robot-referencing collaboration with Austrailian trumpeter TTechmak.
