Konono No. 1 to release Assume Crash Position - watch video

"A blend of traditional Bazombo folk with gritty sound distortions that would make Jimi Hendrix proud... Dizzying, danceable and frenetic..." - Newsweek, USA

Konono No. 1 encourages all to 'Assume Crash Position' with follow up to genre bending Congotronics 1 album via Crammed Discs on June 8th, 2010.

Full North American tour set for July 2010.

The band contributes to Herbie Hancock's forthcoming album The Imagine Project.

Recorded in their home domain of Kinshasa, DR Congo by Congotronics series producer Vincent Kenis, the long-anticipated follow-up to Konono's 2005 debut, Conogotronics 1, sees their trademark thrilling junkyard sonics and relentlessly hypnotic percussive grooves (as created using thumb pianos and drums made from scrap metal and discarded car parts) further elevated with electric guitars and bass - played by neighborhood musicians made up of young Konono protégé's - as well as a wider range of vocalists plus guest appearances from guitarist Manuaku Pepe Felly (Zaïko Langa Langa) and members of fellow Congotronics band Kasai Allstars.

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The band's music is and will always be a very precise mixture of traditional bazombo trance music with the originally-unwanted distortion of their modern home-made equipment...but their sound on Assume Crash Position is somehow deeper, more layered and ethereal, without losing any of that signature raw power and driving energy.

This energy will resonate even further with a US tour that reaches all the corners of the country in some of the finest venues and festival stages July 2010.

Watch Konono N°1 video:

Worldwide reactions to their debut album Congotronics 1 were exceptional, and remarkably won the band massive favor in the dance and alternative rock scenes as well as in world music circles: they picked up a Grammy nomination for Live At Couleur Café, a concert recording released in 2006, and played to thousands at festivals such as Sonar, Coachella and The Big Chill.

Meanwhile an army of celebrity admirers gathered, including Radiohead's Thom Yorke (who played a Konono track on BBC Radio 1), Beck, Björk (whose album Volta featured a guest Konono performance), and Herbie Hancock, to whose forthcoming album they have also contributed. Hancock's record features a whole cast of stellar performances from key figures in the music world.

The gloriously extended full band tracks on Assume Crash Position take off like never before - but also, for the first time, we hear Konono stripped right back to their essence: the album's final song, "Nakobala Lisusu Te", features just the band's founder and master, Mingiedi (now in his late-seventies) and his likembe. "I don't feel like getting married any more", he sings in sweet and mournful tones, "because women nowadays think marriage is just a six month affair".

Konono No. 1 was founded some 44 years ago by Mingiedi, a virtuoso of the likembe (the traditional instrument sometimes called "sanza" or "thumb piano", consisting of metal rods attached to a resonator). Konono No. 1 come from an area which sits right across the border between Congo DR and Angola.

The 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 is also a rhythm section which used traditional and makeshift percussion (pans, pots and car parts), singers, dancers and a peculiar sound system including megaphones dating from the colonial period, which they call "lance-voix" ('voice-throwers').

KONONO NO. 1 LINEUP

Mingiedi Mawangu: likembe
Augustin Makuntima Mawangu: likembe
Menga Waku: vocals, bass likembe
Antoine Ndombele: bass likembe
Pauline Mbuka Nsiala: vocals
Vincent Visi: snare drum
Ndofusu Mbiyavanga: percussion, tam tam
Duki Makumbu: bass guitar

MORE CONGOTRONICS PRESS

"Sounds like no other type of African music... The sophisticated brutality of Konono No. 1 leaves permanent traces in the conscience of the listener" - Les Inrockuptibles, France

"Album Of the Month... Unbelievable..." - Mojo, UK

"A hallucinatory sonic world, simultaneously evocative of avant-garde rock and electro-acoustic experimentation... areas which are of course totally alien to the members of Konono - Libération, France

"Once in a while an album comes along which is so insanely wonderful..." - All About Jazz, USA

"Every so often there comes a record of such unlikeliness, of such overpowering rhythmic intensity and such majestic indifference to global musical trends that you're knocked sideways. This is one of them. Search where you will in rock and hip-hop, you won't find a more viscerally exciting album this year" - Daily Telegraph, UK

"Somewhere between the motorik Kraut-rock repetition of prime Can, a Brazilian carnival and pre-historic acid house" - The Word, UK

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