Tshibaka Mulomba, Chanteur de Demba, Kasaï Occidental

In December 2003, I spun off a highway driving through a blizzard.  I landed in the median strip, my nerves shattered and my car--a two-door Toyota, low to the ground--hobbled.    I had left Columbus, Ohio, in the early morning and made it to Buffalo around lunchtime.  I stopped for a snack in a truck-stop south of the city.  I was heading for Ithaca, to spend a few days with a friend who was teaching at Cornell.  In the early afternoon, back on I-90, heading east, the storm started.  I am a New Englander.  This wasn't my first time pushing through a blizzard on I-90.  Traffic was down to one-lane, visibility limited, and I had been driving for six hours.  Caught in the wake of a long-haul truck, my front tires pulled to the left and I spun out.    

I rocked the car back to front, shifting the manual transmission between reverse and first gear--this wasn't the first time I had been whipped into the median strip during a blizzard, either--got back onto the highway, slid into the single-file traffic, and took the first exit, looking for a gas station.  The suspension was knocked out of alignment and the car rattled worryingly whenever I slowed.  It was mid-afternoon, Ithaca was another six hour drive, through the blizzard, away.  I didn't have the money to call it a day, to wait out the snowstorm in a Motel 6.  

Fuck it.  Back into the snow.  Eight hours later, I wobbled into Ithaca.  During those eight hours, I focused on two things, keeping the car steady, and Tom Waits' 1992 release, Bone Machine.  I haven't listened to the cassette since, but can still feel The Earth Died Screaming, Jesus Is Gonna Be Here, and Murder in the Red Barn.  

I have survived these final months of the shitstorm that has been 2020, much as I did on I-90 pushing east to Ithaca, by ignoring my environment, focusing on one activity (reading), and listening exclusively to one cassette.  This time, an hour of songs by Tshibaka Mulomba, from Demba,  a small town in the Kasaï Occidental (now part of the Kasaï Central).  These songs were recorded in 1993--not long after Bone Machine.  

This is the sixth cassette from the Kasaï that I have shared, all purchased from street vendors in Kananga or Mbuji-Mayi, in 2011.  This one doesn't sound like a live performance--that is, made in front of an audience.  I don't think it is a live-to-boombox recording, either.  My guess is that these songs were recorded in a radio studio.  

I hope Tshibaka Mulomba can help you, as well, get through these final weeks of 2020.   

Download Tshibaka Mulomba 1993  

Keep it on repeat. Enjoy!!