Kora

"Kora" takes its name from the West African instrument — a 21-string harp-lute whose cascading, resonant quality has shaped enormous amounts of music across the continent — and GoGo Penguin uses that reference to push their piano playing toward a different kind of texture. Illingworth constructs lines that have the rippling, overlapping character of kora music: figures that sustain and ring against each other, right-hand and left-hand patterns interlocking in a way that suggests polyphonic string playing rather than the chord-and-melody division of Western piano tradition. The effect is of a single instrument sounding like more than one, of a conversation with itself. The rhythm section responds to this shifted center of gravity, the bass taking on a more melodic role and the drums approaching the groove with a lightness appropriate to music with such resonant top-end detail. There is a quality of longing in the harmonic progressions — not melancholy exactly, but something that reaches across distance, which feels appropriate to music naming a tradition from another part of the world and another set of instruments. The track manages to honor the reference without pastiche; it is not GoGo Penguin playing kora music but GoGo Penguin hearing what kora music is made of and finding those same elements in their own instruments.