New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Newly formed Congolese seven-piece band Mbongwana Star's debut full-length album, From Kinshasa, released in May via World Circuit, distributed in North
America by Nonesuch Records, is now available on vinyl. The LP edition is pressed on 140-gram, audiophile vinyl and includes a download of the complete album. To pick up a copy now, head to your local music shop, Amazon, or the Nonesuch Store in North
America (and in the World Circuit Shop outside North America). Nonesuch Store CD and vinyl orders also include a download of the complete album at checkout.
The album was featured on NPR's All Things Considered, which calls it a "wonderful kind of collaboration," noting that "the sound is out of this world."
Chicago Reader says the "album is a blast ... stunning." "Its strength lies in its dynamic eclecticism, a gleeful mish-mash of genres," says Noisey. "It's time to press play and immerse yourself in another world.
The Guardian gives the new album a perfect five stars. "On From Kinshasa, it's almost impossible to work out where the Congolese musicians end and the European guy begins," says the Guardian's Alexis Petridis. "The sounds on the album ... wind around each other into a knot you can't really unpick. It doesn't sound like a European producer twisting Congolese music to his own ends; it sounds like the work of a band, albeit one intent on doing something not many bands in 2015 seem that interested in doing—jolting the listener with the shock of the new."
Mbongwana Star hails from Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo—a network of shantytowns and night shelters where founding members Coco Ngambali and Theo Nzonza (of Staff Benda Bilili fame) pulled together members of a new generation of Kinshasa musicians embodying the concept of "mbongwana," or "change." Along with maverick Parisian producer Doctor L (Tony Allen, Stomy Bugsy), the band has created a sound that embodies the "smashed-together" nature of the surroundings from which it was born—a sound that fuses traditional Congolese rhythms with European post-punk bass and busted electronics from recycled and reconstructed instruments miked and distorted in unexpected ways.
Of the recording sessions Doctor L (who also plays on and mixed the album) notes, "It's all recorded in the red. Sometimes I over-boost mikes that are recording nothing, just to pick up the environment. Can you hear it? There are three TVs going full blast. Distortion multiplies the energy."
