The earliest circulating recording of Konono No. 1 is "Mungua-Mungua", a half-hour-long live jam that was taped in 1978. Aside from its rudimentary sound quality, it's formally identical to this album, the Congolese band's second studio disc: the amazing sound of electric likembes (metal thumb pianos) playing through fuzzed-up amps and jury-rigged mics, augmented by drums, the occasional whistle, and some call-and-response yelling. Reportedly, the band is used to playing for hours on end. They could go on like that forever, which is both Assume Crash Position's strength and its flaw.
It's been five years since Congotronics introduced Konono to a broader international audience. That record reached people who didn't know a thing about Congolese music, but loved the band's ping-buzz-crack timbre, admired their punkish "use whatever materials are at hand" attitude, and know a killer groove when they heard one. The group has released a few live discs since; it recorded with Björk and had a split single with the Dead C. Konono tour a lot, too. But being a touring act on the American and European festival circuits means you have to have a new record out every once in a while, which means you have to have a new bunch of songs and some kind of artistic evolution to act as a news peg.
Konono, though, simply aren't a song band. They're a live act that does one thing, unbelievably well, and in their way they're as formally limited as Sleep or the Stooges. And "artistic evolution" would be as much a disaster for them as it was for, say, the Ramones: As "Mungua-Mungua" demonstrates, they pretty much perfected their basic approach more than 30 years ago. So Assume Crash Position (reputedly a loose translation of the band's name) is a set of attempts to make a record that's not just Congotronics again, without destroying Konono's essence. Unsurprisingly, a couple of the four long jams that form the album's skeleton have been in their repertoire for a while: "Konono Wa Wa Wa", which gets an eleven and a half minute workout here, appeared on the live Lubuaku in 2004, and "Mama Na Bana" turned up on 2007's Live at Couleur Cafe.
There are a few divergences from the formula. "Thin Legs" is a brief likembe-less piece, just drums and voice; "Wumbanzanga" throws in some electric guitar and what might be keyboards; "Guiyome" sounds like it's just the head of what might be a much longer piece, and segues straight into "Konono Wa Wa Wa". And the closer, "Nakobala Lisusu Te", is septuagenarian bandleader (and amp-builder) Mawangu Mingiedi's solo, unamplified, forgettable voice-and-likembe piece. The formula beats all of the divergences--and that may mean that recording this magnificent band in the studio a second time was superfluous.
