Congotronics International is a supergroup featuring Konono Nº1, Kasai Allstars, Deerhoof, Juana Molina, Wildbirds & Peacedrums, and Skeletons’ Matt Mehlan, and they'll release their debut album, Where’s The One?, on April 29 via Crammed Discs. This is a project that's been brewing for 11 years, and features s 21 tracks, including live concert recordings and studio tracks produced in the years before, during, and after the 2011 "Congotronics vs. Rockers" tour that featured all of groups and artists mentioned above. Here's more from the press release:
For several months ahead of the tour, a fascinating remote writing process began to take place. Demos started flying back and forth over the internet. Someone would start a song and send it on to the others, the same track sometimes traveling three times around the globe as Vincent Kenis was in Kinshasa with the Congolese artists, while Juana Molina, Deerhoof, Skeletons’ Mehlan, and Wildbirds & Peacedrums worked from their respective studios located in Buenos Aires, New Mexico, New York, and Stockholm. Everyone eventually flew to Brussels to finish writing what would become Where’s The One?, and to rehearse for the Congotronics vs. Rockers tour.
During these intense sessions, the specificities of the supergroup emerged: there was to be no leader, with everything conceived collectively, and many languages were spoken in the band (Lingala, Tshiluba, English, Spanish, French, Swedish), but few people spoke more than one or two. The musical languages were another story, however, and simultaneously more and less mutually intelligible: more, because verbal communication wasn’t always necessary in those matters; less, because massive gaps sometimes needed to be bridged (the album title itself Where’s the One? refers to this barrier and the initial difficulties in agreeing on how to understand each other’s rhythms: “where does the first beat actually fall?”). The recording process continued remotely on and off in the 11 years that followed until it was finalized in 2021 by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich and Greg Saunier and Crammed Discs’ Marc Hollander. The album's mixing by Saunier serves to elevate its live recordings into a seamless whole alongside the studio tracks.