Brought to you as a joint effort between This Thing Is Plural and People’s Education, this video mix (compiled by Malik Ntone Edjabe) forms part as part of a larger project exploring popular/urban musical modes from around the continent – Music Education in the Contemporary African Context.
Excerpt from Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds by Achille Mbembe: In the Congolese paradigm, “any event involving sound is called music if it involves a certain surplus force. At particular moments, carried by the imagination to the brink of intoxication, the musical phrase takes the form of a volcanic effusion. Mixed with words, soaring bursts from the guitar, screams, percussion and melody, it is transformed into an image of the very doors of hell – ear punching frenzy, groping disorder and energy. Or instead it becomes an effusion of tears, provoked by the haunting memory of mourning or by jubilation and the unchained outpouring of emotion. And so it reflects as much the hollow tolling of reality as the pending fulfilment of still awaited promise, an interweaving of myriad figures, the beautiful and the ugly intertwined in the image of life itself.”