Paradiso

Something shifts in this recording — there is still the unmistakable buzz and clatter of Konono No.1's homemade electric likembe ensemble, but the piece has a quality that the title gestures toward: something almost transcendent, reaching upward through all that beautiful noise. The interlocking patterns that define their sound are here, those thumb-plucked melodies weaving around each other in a trance-inducing grid, but there is a melodic quality in this particular piece that feels more open, more searching. The distortion on the instruments creates overtones that pile up into something resembling texture as much as melody — you are hearing the buzzing harmonics as much as the intended notes, and this blur is not a failure but the point. Voices appear and disappear in the mix, neither leading nor following, just part of the larger organism. The drums underneath drive everything forward with the patience of something that has been moving longer than you have been listening and will continue moving after you stop. This is music that exists at the threshold between the physical and something else — what you might call spiritual if you have that category, or simply altered if you don't. You would encounter this somewhere unexpected and feel briefly unmoored from ordinary time.