Noir et Blanc was released in 1983, yet it still sounds like a broadcast from the future. The work of Congolese and French musicians using analog synthesizers, strange effects, stranger time signatures, and acoustic instruments—steel guitar, clarinet, kalimba—and singing over them in Swahili, Kikongo, Lingala, and pidgin French, it reappears now not so much as a reissue, but as a boomerang across space and time. The title, which translates as “black and white,” doesn’t do justice to a collision of sounds and ideas that yields something more like an iridescent spray of color, like a firehose shot across a beam of sunlight. Far from binary opposites, its composite parts break down into a thousand dynamic shades of grey. It is an album that unseats assumptions.
Most records this influential inspire reams of imitators, sometimes entire genres. That this one did not might come down to the uniqueness not just of its sound but also its circumstances. Kinshasa’s Bony Bikaye was living in Belgium, working on an album by a Congolese soukous band, when he told the French composer Hector Zazou of his interest in krautrock and Stockhausen. Zazou made some introductions, and Bikaye was soon in the studio with the electronic musicians Guillaume Loizillon and Claude Micheli (collectively known as the duo CY1), who laid down knotty sequences and gurgling metallic textures while Bikaye multi-tracked his voice in warm, woozy layers. This reissue makes five of their demo recordings available for the first time, and they sound wonderfully alien: weird, vine-like tangles of arpeggiated synthesizer and sweetly harmonized vocals, robotic and ghostly all at once.
Zazou played the demos to Crammed Discs, a Belgian label with post-punk roots and globe-trotting tastes, who liked what they heard, and the group reconvened in a Brussels studio to record a proper album, assisted this time by a handful of collaborators. Crammed co-founder Marc Hollander played clarinet, and Vincent Kenis, his bandmate from the group Aksak Maboul, contributed spidery guitar—shimmering harmonics, desert-blues pedal steel. The British progressive-rock legend Fred Frith contributed scraping violin to a few tracks. Lithe, raindrop-like pulses alternate with convoluted rhythms in 5/8 time, and drums related to Jamaican Nyabinghi drumming link up with sounds found on Depeche Mode’s earliest recordings. The record’s time-traveling powers are apparent in its very few bars, which sound for all the world like brisk, blippy dancehall reggae from two decades hence, and from there, all bets are off. Congas run through ring modulator erupt into soft bursts of white noise; Hollander’s clarinet traces a Balkan melody, while Bikaye playfully explores the depths of his gravelly baritone.
At times, it’s difficult to tease out exactly what is electronic and what’s acoustic. In the liner notes, Kenis describes how Konono Nº1, whom he had discovered around that time, inspired his use of guitar effects, and in “Mangungu,” his guitar bristles with harmonics, while vine-like synths wrap around a convoluted rhythm. In “Eh! Yaye,” a dry, flat drum machine is garlanded with pings, chimes, and even a bicycle bell, while Bikaye’s voice is spun into an entire chorus. Kenis’ guitar solo here—a tribute to to Demola Adepoju, King Sunny Ade’s steel guitarist—is among the album’s most electrifying moments.
“Dju Ya Feza” comes closest to the period’s post-punk: The grinding beat sounds almost industrial, and the dissonant, hardscrabble guitar glows red hot. Perhaps it’s because Bikaye’s almost comic style of sing-speaking here is so seductive, but no matter how hard you listen, you can’t quite catch everything that’s going on in the background: chirping birds, flying sparks, the whine of ricocheting bullets. “Munipe Wa Kati” explores the same idea to more dulcet ends, weaving plucked kalimba and electronic birdsong around a synthesizer pattern that leads the ear away from conventional notes and toward the realm of pure texture. For these musicians, making sound was a kind of sleight-of-hand, and electronics were alchemical tools for turning familiar sounds deeply unfamiliar.
Adding to the strangeness of it all was the fact that the names on the record’s front cover—ZAZOU/BIKAYE/CY1—obscured more than they revealed. There was little indication that CY1 was a duo, for one thing, and even less that Zazou didn’t play a lick of music on the record. It was a trio masquerading as a quartet masquerading as a trio, basically: Bikaye, Loizillon, and Micheli shared writing credits, while the record was “directed” and arranged by Zazou, according to the fine print. (This was Zazou’s M.O.; in 1993, The Wire described him as “a convener” in the mold of Bill Laswell or Peter Gabriel: “a strong attractor, the hub of a conferencing system through which musicians of the world meet.”)
The record wasn’t entirely without precedent. Two years earlier, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts had run non-Western sounds through Anglo-American art-rock and electronic processing. That same year, Craig Leon’s Nommos had channeled Malian mythology into all-electronic compositions whose metallic machine beats anticipate the sound and texture of CY1’s rhythms. Still, the sound of the record was wildly anomalous for the period. Even today, with modular synthesis arguably more popular than it’s ever been, CY1’s twitchy oscillations sound like a transmission from another planet, and it’s hard, if not impossible, to think of another record, then or now, that combines such far-out beats with such hypnotic Central African melodies.
Whatever accounts for the magic that created the album, it was a one-time thing. CY1, Bikaye, and Zazou would tour together, but the full group never put out another record; there’s nothing else in CY1’s discography at all. And Zazou and Bikaye’s subsequent albums Mr. Manager and Guilty !, with their garish gated snares and comparatively conventional electro-funk flourishes, only underscore how remarkable Noir et Blanc was, and is. Thirty-four years later, its quicksilver palette sounds as joyously original as ever.
