Rocking the thumb piano

VINCENT KENIS has no idea what the music of Konono N°1 sounds like to someone hearing it for the first time.

“I can’t imagine how somebody who doesn’t know about traditional Central African music hears it,” he says. “Non-tempered heavy metal tropical rock or something!”

The Congolese group plays music made largely on traditional likembe (so-called thumb pianos of metal-prong keys and resonators) run through homemade microphones and distortion-heavy amplification, creating a swirl of hypnotic, otherworldly tones.

Kenis, though, remembers clearly when he first heard it more than 25 years ago. The Belgian producer was then a young musician touring Europe in a band when he tuned in to a radio broadcast of music from the Congo.

“It was just music the guy on the radio had heard in the streets in Kinshasa,” Kenis recalls. “I was lucky enough to have a cassette ready and recorded the tape and kept listening to it on the bus on tour.”

The sounds he heard were highly rhythmic, metallic, percussive, not exactly complex but still hard to figure out in terms of patterns and tonalities. That exposure changed the music of the band he was in, Honeymoon Killers, giving it a more brutal, experimental edge. And ultimately, it had a huge impact on his life, as it stayed in his mind in the course of his career evolution into a world music-oriented producer for the Brussels-based Crammed Discs record label, a job that took him to Congo -- then known as Zaire -- starting in 1989.

“I kept remembering the group and asking for them,” he says. “But only in 2000 did I finally find them after my fourth trip to the Congo.” And best of all, “they sounded pretty much like the old tape, only better and more crazy.”

Now, thanks to Kenis, many people are getting to experience this distinctive music. Once he found the group, still headed by founder Mawangu Mingiedi, he made new recordings. The first release from the sessions, recorded live in street performances, came on the 2005 album “Congotronics” and became a cause celebre among world music aficionados -- including Bjork, who recruited the group to play on her new song “Earth Intruders” for her upcoming album, “Volta.”

“Congotronics 2” followed in 2006, with Konono N°1 featured along with other groups Kenis had found along the way. A “Live in Tokyo” Konono EP has just been released exclusively through the EMusic download service. And today, Konono is scheduled to present its distinctive trance-y sounds to thousands of people in the Indio desert at the massive Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.

The music played at Coachella will only be a taste of what one would hear in the Congo, where bands such as this perform at weddings, funerals and other occasions that can last for several days, individual pieces of music often stretching to 40 minutes, and some longer. Kenis notes that Congolese music was heavily influenced by Cuban son styles in the ‘40s and ‘50s, but that those elements are very distant now. Still, he’s not surprised the music has found favor outside of the Congo.

“What catches people’s ears without them knowing it is the fact that it isn’t tuned like Western instruments,” he says. “Something happens when you play two notes together through distorted amplification, suggests notes that aren’t there. And since the tuning system of the likembe is different, the color of the distortion is completely different.”

That distinctiveness is a product equally of the cultural circumstances behind the music and the technology through which it is played, he says. Violent political struggles (ongoing factional fighting has bloodied Kinshasa and caused many to flee to surrounding communities) and rampant poverty have left the musicians, literally, to their own devices for several generations. Mingiedi (who was unavailable to be interviewed because of difficulties in communications channels from the Congo) and others followed the traditions, but added their own twists by using cannibalized auto parts and whatever else was available to jury-rig amplification systems.

That, Kenis says, is as essential a part of the music as anything.

“People accuse me of being attracted by poverty, but that’s not true,” he says. “I don’t think music is made by poverty. It’s made by this place. It’s an incredible geographical meeting point. But limitations force you to be creative. If they had brand-new synthesizers, the music would not exist.”

Though the music has grabbed fans around the globe, it’s nowhere close to a phenomenon on the level of the Cuban-revival Buena Vista Social Club, with a total of 35,000 “Congotronics” albums sold thus far.

The EMusic service has been one of the biggest boosters for these recordings, prominently promoting the “Congotronics” releases to its more than 300,000 subscribers.

But Michael Azerrad, the site’s editor in chief and a passionate Konono fan, is realistic about the appeal.

“The first time I heard Konono N°1, I thought it sounded like Jimi Hendrix covering Talking Heads’ ‘I Zimbra,’ ” says Azerrad. “It was mesmerizing and electric in a low-tech, ‘Blade Runner’ kind of way, like Steve Reich through a fuzzboxx. But suffice it to say, this is not melodic music that lends itself to three-minute radio edits, so the appeal is somewhat limited.... As brilliant as it is, it’s just not easy listening.”

That’s fine by Kenis. While Konono gladly accepted Bjork’s invitation, the band, which also plays the Henry Fonda Theatre on Monday night, has politely refused the many others that have come for collaborations with Western artists.

“Others have approached, but we turned them all down,” Kenis says. “They don’t want to be just a flavor you put on top of something that has nothing to do with what they’re doing. It’s too easy. They won’t do that. They want togetherness, and you can’t get togetherness with people you just run into.”

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Konono Nº1 performs tonight at 7 in the Gobi Tent.