A couple of years ago, music nerds (FADER employees) went nuts for the likembé jam sessions of Konono No 1, the first in Crammed Discs' Congotronics series and an intro to the DIY trance joints that we still put on when we need to totally divest ourselves from 3-minute pop songs. The newest Congotronics release, coming in September, is from Kinshasa's twenty-five strong supergroup the Kasai Allstars. Allstars is not a rhetorical device intended to make them sound awesome (they sound awesome), they are the best of five different bands from five different ethnic groups in the Kasai region who've decided that the world is mentally ready for overwhelmingly shredding electric guitar/thumb piano/lokole/likembe/xylophone/resonator drum/mult-vocalist dance numbers. We are ready. You are ready.
This is a video of Kasai Allstars rehearsing the 13-minute "Mpofu" in Kinshasa last year. Guess what? It's terrible. Not really, it's amazing, but the song is not on their new album In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic (pwn3d). You can a hear a couple over on their MySpace though, and if you sign up for Crammed Disc's Greedbag, you might get a couple more for free off the Crammed Crash Course complimentary compilation.