Bandito bards dropping bars in the bifurcating cleft of commerce and culture, nervous flows of energy and goods, commodities and the condemned, circulating in synergy and thriving in a vivid sanctum of sound. In 2021 Congolese producer DJ Fantôme set up a studio in the heart of Kinshasa's Zando ya Monene, the market mecca, a complex of vendors and hustlers who will sell you everything you need, and plenty you won't, an ecosystem of petty puckish entrepreneurs who toil tirelessly to relieve the witless and careless of the burden of an overstuffed pocketbook, literally and figuratively robbing the rubes as an ROI for loading all their skill points in rhetoric and sleight of hand. In this den of dealers, dips, and dubbers, DJ Fantôme found inspiration for a sound project that combined the bustle and bully of this shopstall sprawl with the after-hours retreat of the club where many of these rapscallions can be located after a long day of profit and plunder. Offering various gang members and other locals the chance to spit shards and barbs over his original beats, Zando Beat ! is an attempt to capture the effervescent energy of this market and mayhem mill and juice it with the pulse it deserves, threading the barking, chiding clip, and frequently commanding prose of amateur vocalists with the enigmatic producer's fresh and freaky strains of ghetto techno and trance. It's a symbiosis worth celebrating, flourishing in the open, and thriving in the narrow trench of the tacit vice that validates the will to survive. It's one of those mixes where you have to watch your back while you boogie to it, but that small trippy dose of malice just adds to the thrill of it all.
Ain't no fortress of solitude, this is an armory of sound (Palenque Records).
