Beijing Rock and African Trance!

Yesterday, I read this Kaiju Shakedown about Jackie Chan's iTunes playlist. I don't pay attention to celebrity music recommendations unless it's from a musician I like, but this made me too curious. What does Jacky listen to? Well, first thing I found out is that the man sings! Indeed, he's got an album out. Interesting, but nothing I'd want to listen to.

Then I spotted the name HANG ON THE BOX. I knew them! An all-girl band from Beijing whose short, snappy punk songs I'd rather enjoyed listening to a few year ago (the songs are still available on their old Sister Records site. But I'd forgotten about them for a while. Time to see what they'd been up to lately! So I googled them and lo and behold, they've got a snazzy new site! I discovered they had a new lineup- with the addition of male guitarist Xiao Gan, they no longer qualified as a girl-band. They'd released a couple of new albums out since I last checked. But best of all, the site had new songs to listen to! I checked out the song Rollercoaster (streaming WMA there), described on their site as an "electro-spacerock number." Intriguing!

Whoa! This song was so different from their old stuff! Punk no more, they were. Electro-spacerock was apt. Sounded... experimental. Bit like Mars Volta (no surprise- their guitarist is a fan!). But very enjoyable! It's been a while since a band really surprised me and HANG IN THE BOX have done just that. I look forward to their next album!

Though, impatient to hear more of their stuff, I took the liberty of downloading their last album- Foxy Lady (actually an EP with a cover of Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady and 2 new songs, padded out with older songs. Not that I mind!). Great stuff! The albums on my to-buy list, along with their previous album "Di Di Di" and their compilation album "For Every Punk B**ch & A**ehole". I'll see if I can't cajole a local music store into bringing in their stuff.

What does all this have to do with African Trance, though? Well, while perusing their site I took a look at their links section and spotted a link for "Konono No.1 (the African Neubauten!)." I have no idea who Neubauten is but I clicked the link anyway! And so I ended up at the site for KONONO N°1, a band from Congo whose music is out of this world!!!

The band uses traditional instruments called likembés or thumb pianos, microphones made out of recycled car magnets and a percussion section made of junk! And they use this unusual setup to make totally funky music. But don't take my word for it! Listen to this MP3 and check out this video of the band performing.