Butu by Kokoko
“Experimental music from Africa” seems like a forbidding phrase for the idly interested listener, akin to “post-bop jazz” or “triple-LP progressive-rock concept album.” However, KOKOKO!, a collective based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, romps past this barrier of terminology by embedding irresistible rhythmic pulses into every track.
The title of the collective’s second full-length, Butu, translates as “the night” from Lingala (the title of the first, 2019’s Fongola, translates as “the key”) and the music makes art of the nocturnal energy KOKOKO! siphons from its home city, Kinshasa.
If the art initially came from items literally found on the street—upcycled cans, metal, plastic: trash—now it comes from the street with a more metaphorical perspective. Producer Xavier “Débruit” Thomas and singer Makara Bianko, who remain the central twosome, utilize more electronics to convey a sense of urban electricity, of flickering streetlights and traffic patterns and barroom amplifiers.
Butu opens with that electricity: “Butu Ezo Ya” brings a synthesizer drone and crosscut flashes of percussion through a slowly fading environment of city noises, and then Bianko shifting from chants, some filtered and some pitch-shifted, to a patter he delivers as urgently and crisply as any old-school rapper could have.
“Mokili” computerizes multiple tempos, including a stop-start tribalistic beat, a Ladysmith Black Mambazo shuffle, and ska-adjacent speediness prefaced by brief midtempo simplicity and a birdlike whistle. “Bazo Banga” sports a bassline and guitar figure that wouldn’t be out of place in a punky Rancid song. And “Kidoka” creates tense stillness via call-and-response shouts that could be intruder warnings passed among neighbors.
While the language in the lyrics makes no concessions to Eurocentrism, the music will, to Western ears, feel as intelligently multicultural as Eno or Talking Heads. The collective’s own name, KOKOKO!, is a Congolese verbal knock at the door; Butu is an unusual knock that even the experimentally averse will answer.
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