IT's A BOMB (vinyl)

Description

The music of Congolese artist Bony Bikaye long had to be sought out in the purgatory of “world music,” that place of all possibilities, where rough diamonds rubbed shoulders with bland nightmares of white-bread types who froze rumba into fish-finger form. Sometimes, in a subtler sin, they put it on the menu just when some people wanted to move on. It is the trio TONN3RR3 who take up the torch to build with him this record that proudly sets out its colors: “It’s a bomb”. Conceived at home by Guillaume Gilles (composition/keyboards), the album was finished at the One Two Pass It studio, with Olivier Viadero and Gaëlle Salomon on percussion, Yoann Dubaud (machines & bass) and Guillaume Loizillon (synth programming and matchmaker for the whole affair). It is a deeply musical record, played by an erudite team that has nothing left to prove, and you can hear it. Without attitude, the record floats well above the fray. You’ve been warned: “keba na butu”, beware. Watch out, yes: beyond the simple pleasures of soukouss, or the rumba guitar riff that spins like a merry-go-round that no longer passes inspection, it is the total luxuriance of the arrangements that strikes you. The all-powerful orchestra beats everyone at their own game in a style that breaks down barriers, with a fine spirit of synthesis. There is straight, syncopated, 808, and the typical bass lines that make your knees rise... but it is never a mush: in this global sound system, there is a vision. Bikaye, renamed BIKAY3 for the occasion, has fun with his well-honed voice, whose wild vibrato has matured like a fine plum. He puts it at the service — notably in “Zela” and “Balobi” — of a showy flamboyance in the style of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Bikaye likes to play with singing, and his pleasure in language goes all the way to pure storytelling. Thus “La forêt et les dieux” is an excursion in French into the bush, moving over a mossy carpet of synths and percussion to tell us, in a spoken, wet voice, a brilliant, sleep-inducing cosmogony. Guillaume Loizillon’s synth and Nicole Mitchell’s flute complete, in Akei, this stroll through Byrne/Eno’s “bush of ghosts,” where Lingala or Kikongo is spoken. “It’s a bomb” bastard rumba closes the ball with a rimshot that cracks like a fresh hand on a consenting skin. So for sure, we are living in a golden age, reissues are coming out in droves and satisfying our desire to catch up on the musical heritage of our neighbors, but let’s not miss the boat: now is the time, if ever there was one, to listen to the music of the living. --- Halory Goerger ---. That is the case with Bikaye, who grew up in a bath of European music, digs Kraut, wrestles with trad’, and comes looking for musical trouble in Brussels. Bony Bikaye would record several albums there with CY1 (Loizillon/Micheli), and a few defectors from “Tueurs de la lune de miel”, produced by Hector Zazou.