This post features another 'live to boombox' recording. Syla Muntungenge is not a virtuosic guitar player and he doesn't have an extraordinary voice, but there is a sincerity to his simple, hypnotic, songs that I find deeply satisfying.
Muntungenge is a Baluba troubadour from Tshikapa, a diamond-mining town in the Kasai district of the Kasai Occidental province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tshikipa, which was founded by a mining company in the early 1900s, straddles the confluence of the Kasai and Tshikapa rivers, and is just 40km north of the Angolan border.
This recording was made in 1995. It is one of the few dozen cassettes I found in Kanaga, the capital of the Kasai-Occidental province (120 miles east of Tshikapa). Syla Muntungenge seems to have been hired to celebrate the wedding anniversary of a young man from Tshikapa. He introduces the cassette by saying, in Tshiluba then French, 'For the last 21 years our son Kande Lenga from the village of Biduaya has been married to Mariale from the village of Kayombo. Two people bound by a love that no one can weaken. My dear friends, I declare that love is an illness that no one can shake. Me, personally, I put my faith in this couple. I wish them the best of luck and may god bless them, without forgetting my colleague Charmeur Idi wa Bakuwamu (sp?).'
Download Syla Muntungenge
I don't know anything about Sylva Muntungenge and he does not seem to exist on our world wide web. When I purchased this cassette, in 2011, he was, according to the young men who dubbed the cassette for me, still alive. Phone calls to Tshikapa have proven fruitless. Sylva's voice is accompanied by his cyclical guitar motifs and a steady rhtyhmic timeline beat on a glass bottle--I am assuming by the aforementioned Charmeur Idi wa Bakuwamu (sp?).
There are occasional pops and squabbles on this cassette, as well as a few passages that were recorded over with other music (I haven't edited out the disruptions), but they don't keep me from relaxing to this hour of intimate musicmaking.
Thanks to Fiston Saint Jagger Alanga Nzembo for his help.
Find a quiet space and time and let yourself drift away to the banks of the Kasai river.
Muntungenge is a Baluba troubadour from Tshikapa, a diamond-mining town in the Kasai district of the Kasai Occidental province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Tshikipa, which was founded by a mining company in the early 1900s, straddles the confluence of the Kasai and Tshikapa rivers, and is just 40km north of the Angolan border.
This recording was made in 1995. It is one of the few dozen cassettes I found in Kanaga, the capital of the Kasai-Occidental province (120 miles east of Tshikapa). Syla Muntungenge seems to have been hired to celebrate the wedding anniversary of a young man from Tshikapa. He introduces the cassette by saying, in Tshiluba then French, 'For the last 21 years our son Kande Lenga from the village of Biduaya has been married to Mariale from the village of Kayombo. Two people bound by a love that no one can weaken. My dear friends, I declare that love is an illness that no one can shake. Me, personally, I put my faith in this couple. I wish them the best of luck and may god bless them, without forgetting my colleague Charmeur Idi wa Bakuwamu (sp?).'
Download Syla Muntungenge
I don't know anything about Sylva Muntungenge and he does not seem to exist on our world wide web. When I purchased this cassette, in 2011, he was, according to the young men who dubbed the cassette for me, still alive. Phone calls to Tshikapa have proven fruitless. Sylva's voice is accompanied by his cyclical guitar motifs and a steady rhtyhmic timeline beat on a glass bottle--I am assuming by the aforementioned Charmeur Idi wa Bakuwamu (sp?).
There are occasional pops and squabbles on this cassette, as well as a few passages that were recorded over with other music (I haven't edited out the disruptions), but they don't keep me from relaxing to this hour of intimate musicmaking.
Thanks to Fiston Saint Jagger Alanga Nzembo for his help.
Find a quiet space and time and let yourself drift away to the banks of the Kasai river.
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