David Toop imagined future music in his book Ocean of Sound as "all winking lights and digital exchanges across alien cultures." In July of this year Blur/Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn brought a group of producers to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in an attempt to forge some of those exchanges of his own. Along for the ride were XL Recordings boss Richard Russell, frequent Albarn collaborator Dan the Automator, and self-styled "R&B concrete" producer Actress. Over the course of five days, local musicians came and went, bringing with them various esoteric instruments and lending their vocals to different songs, while Albarn's producer-collective worked as a unit to fashion the finished product into Kinshasa One Two. Video from the recordings highlights the cross-cultural gap that needed to be bridged, with Albarn communicating via hand gestures and vocal inflections, and the rest of his team surrounding the local musicians with the "winking lights" of their digital gadgetry.
In a sense this is a more fully realized vision of the Mali Music project Albarn released in 2002. That record saw him gingerly feeling out whether harmony could be extracted through the osmosis of his trip-hop and pop-oriented outlook and the work of Malian artists including Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabaté. In contrast, Kinshasa One Two is a more confident recording, with Albarn still working outside his comfort zone but given little chance to think or breathe due to the self-imposed time limit on the project. All the colors feel a little brighter here, especially when the energy of the Congolese musicians is allowed to shine through. With so many people involved, both locally and from the imported crew of producers, it's no surprise that Kinshasa One Two feels unfocused at times. There's no underlying narrative or musical structure to this record; instead it's a grab bag of ideas and impulses, assembled as an approximation of the raggedy and lively way in which the recordings were conceived.
For much of this album, it doesn't feel like the two contrasting approaches solidify into a satisfying whole, with stems of ideas stretching out toward one another but never fully germinating. Instead, the focus gently rocks back and forth. At times ("Hallo", "African Space Anthem") the gap between DRC Music and Gorillaz is negligible. "Hallo" comes across like this album's "Stylo", with its featherweight pop groove and Albarn's strained falsetto demonstrating his undeniable pop know-how. On "K-Town" the group moves closer to the exuberant Ethio-jazz swing of Mulatu Astatke's "Yègellé Tezeta", while "We Come From the Forest" leaps into a frantic pace via the great swoons of thumb piano that click and clack into place. The latter is a stark demonstration of the successes and failures of this project, where the bubbling electronics of Albarn's team become cursory and intrusive, causing the vigorous backbone laid out by Bokatola System (who surface four times on this album) to feel like it would work better in isolation.
So Kinshasa One Two often comes across an album that doesn't know what it wants to be, and that's mostly in keeping with the nature of the way it was conceived. But the raw power of the music from the region, which is presumably what attracted Albarn and his group to make this record, often feels curiously lacking in this context. Perhaps that's an inevitable consequence of mixing up these different styles. But the weak, Portishead-lite beats aren't missed when you hear the vocalist Love performing the song "Love" a cappella, and the ultra-distorted hidden track at the end of the album derives a brash charm from its coarse textures. The unshackled nature of those pieces makes the contributions of the Congolese musicians elsewhere on this record feel restrained. There's none of the unhinged joy you might find on a Sublime Frequencies recording like Group Inerane's startling Guitars From Agadez, which causes it to feel like unnecessary restrictions were being imposed for the sake of balance between the musicians involved.
It's when the quest for equilibrium eases up that the quality rises a notch or two in either direction. The contribution of Washiba is barely detectable on the slamming, LFO-circa-"Freak" techno of "If You Wish to Stay Awake", while the softly spun groove of "Lourds" is pleasingly dominated by the forceful personality of Yende Bongongo. Occasionally successful collaborations arise, usually when the loopy impulses of both sides are fully indulged; the rattle and bump of "Customs" is particularly notable in that regard. But often it's hard to reconcile the songs here with the lively video clips from the sessions on the DRC Music Tumblr, and that's its central flaw-- a little spirit got lost along the way, somewhere between the performance and the final mastering, possibly due to the sheer weight of numbers involved in the recording process. Despite those reservations, Kinshasa One Two is worthwhile both as a cause (all proceeds from sales go to Oxfam) and as an experiment, albeit one that requires some judicious editing to extract the tracks that really count.
