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Ngwaka Son Systéme - Iboto Ngenge
BUY LINK: https://eckecho.bandcamp.com/album/iboto-ngenge
Label: Eck Echo (https://soundcloud.com/eck-echo)
https://www.instagram.com/eck_echo
> Cerrero (https://www.instagram.com/cerrero_)
Ngwaka Son Systéme’s debut album brings together the newest talent of the megacity’s scene, under the musical direction of Love Lokombe (vocals, percussion) and Bom’s Bomolo (guitar), both seasoned veterans who learned their trade as founders of the band @kokokomusic.
Iboto Ngenge means “power struggle” or “seizing the opportunity” but while words can only be roughly translated, the music reaches listeners unambiguously: A potent mixture of techno, rumba, soukous, zagué and dancehall with the unique “Kinoise” brand – the city that never stops innovating in the music landscape worldwide.
Iboto Ngenge was recorded and mixed by engineer and beatmaker Levy David in the studio Timbela Ba Timbela Yo, which serves as a gravitational centre for MCs and beatmakers to share their craft.
The album opens with Okokok -the title being both a twist and a reference to the musicians’ previous school of KOKOKO! - which invites the audiences to attend gospel-like ceremony or ritual of initiation, presenting the band to the world for the first time with this melodic lullaby.
The gears quickly shift with the inadvertently techno-oriented Lakala, a trance-inducing experience where listeners can quickly relish to the lyrics even without speaking Lingala, for the shapes of the words are already inviting listeners to dance, sing and smile, all the while virtuoso percussionist Steroy operates the DIY- drum kit at high-tempo.
Fresh out of the scene, the band is joined by MCs Lakala and Boomastyl who place the emphasis on Jamaican styles with their contagious flow that carries personality and attitude all along the banks of the Congo river. The call-and-response effect, where each musician lends their voice to the choir, is particularly felt in Bo Lobi Pe, where the vocals guide us ever so playfully to the tune of an acoustic guitar that invites us to take off our shoes, kick back and relax.
Benda Singa (“pull the string”) resumes the stream of dancefloor-igniting songs where MC Lakala casually paints lyrical frames of a young musicians about to wake up from a dream and into the stream of lucid consciousness where he is caught in res media with the band is already in rehearsal-mode.
Zanga Mbongo (translated as “there is no money”) is lyrically a proud anthem to celebrating life in spite of economic scarcity, and musically it is a triumphant renewal to the legendary soukous genre of the 1970s, championed by worldwide renowned stars such as Pepe Kallé and Sam Mangwana.
The adventure closes with Dondwa, an Afrobeat-oriented tune where the vocals cary a carefully balanced dosage of autotune effects playfully bouncing back-and-forth between Boms Bomolo’s cascading guitar riffs.
The bonus dub version of Zanga Mbongo showcases the creative engineering approach of musician Diego Gomez (a.k.a Cerrero), whose past work with UK dubmaster Adrian Sherwood brought the “Dub de Gaita” project to life, thus picking up once more with renewed energy, the bond between Jamaica and Colombia, shifting the shape this time into a triangle where Congo represents the largest side.
Continuing his meteoric rise to the top of the European dancefloor, Venezuela’s DJ Baba dissects the vocal stems of band Ngwaka Son Systéme to take us on an intense ride that showcases the big- room potential of the Raptor House genre, marrying Africa and the Latin Caribbean in the process, as it always has.
- Genre
- Electronic