TONN3RR3 BIKAY3
Mysterious Dance
FRANCE
BIO
For a long time, the music of Congo-born Bony Bikaye had to be sought in the purgatory of «world music», where diamonds in the rough cohabited with bland nightmares of white dudes who froze rumba like fish sticks. Worse, they did put it on the menu, when so many
longed to move on. Take Bikaye, who grew up listening to modern european music, struggling with tradition, obviously looking for trouble in the genre. With Hector Zazou, they found each other, and Aksak Maboul fans recognized their sub-tropical cousins. Now it’s up to french trio TONN3RR3 to take up the torch and build this project that proudly brags: «It’s a bomb».
Thought up at home by Guillaume Gilles (compo/keyboards), the album was finished at One Two Pass It studio, with Olivier Viadero and Gaëlle Salomon on percussion, YoannDubaud (machines & bass) and Guillaume Loizillon (synth veteran of CY1 fame, and matchmaker of
this affair). It’s a deeply musical record, crafted by no-attitude reference players with nothing left to prove, and you can hear it. Floats well above the fray.
“Keba na butu”, beware. Indeed : beyond the simple pleasures of soukouss, or the rumba guitar riff that spins like a merry-go-round that skipped technical inspection, lie lush orchestrations. Freestyle, synthetic : something old, something new, something what-thefuck-is-that-now. There’s straight, there’s syncopated, there’s 808 and knee-jerk inducing bass patterns…with a vision. BIKAY3 plays his voice more than ever. His crazy vibrato has improved like hard liquor over the years. In «Zela» and «Balobi» in particular, he puts it to good use with flamboyant, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins-style antics. He can also resort to pure storytelling : «La forêt et les dieux», is a French-spoken excursion into the wild, moving along in grasslands of synths and percussion with TONN3RR3. A tale of gods and spirits, plain and simple. Nicole Mitchell brings the occasional flute in “Akei” for this trip in the bush of ghosts where lingala and kikongo rub with English and French. They saved «It’s a bomb» for the end, a bastardized rumba, with rimshots that slap like a cool hand on willing skin.
We’re living in a golden age of reissues coming out in droves and satisfying our desire to catch up on our neighbors’ musical heritage, but let’s not miss the boat : it’s now or never to listen to the music of the living
DISCOGRAPHY – TONN3RR3
2022 : Noir Atlantique – LP numérique et vinyle
2021 : O Galop – SINGLE
2020 : Risqué – SINGLE
2020 : Distance – SINGLE
2020 : Rêve en l’air – SINGLE
2020 : Canicule – SINGLE
2019 : Le début, le Bois – EP (Hydropathes Records & Metadrone Records) en numérique + vinyle