KINACT - Kinshasa in Action (March 27, 2026)

OotyPa · Mar 3, 2026

Nyege Nyege Tapes always puts out really good shit and I have high hopes for this one. Been really digging the afrofuturist sound lately and this seems to fit the bill perfectly.

Operating at the intersection of sound, movement and sculpture, Kinshasa based street art collective KINACT collapse performance and ritual into music on their debut LP: Kinshasa in Action...

...Across 11 tracks, a new chapter of industrial Congolese street sound takes shape, interlocking drills, hammers, saws, motorcycle engines, discarded pill packets, plastic bags, bamboo sticks and a homemade xylophone with raw chants, spectral invocations and communal drum circles. It sits somewhere between Einstürzende Neubauten’s industrial clang, Konono No.1’s distorted amplification and African Head Charge’s dread-soaked voodoo minimalism, yet remains grounded in Kinshasa’s street heat and night air. What emerges is a scorched suite of industrial Congolese percussion, equal parts scrapyard theatre and nocturnal trance.

OotyPa · Mar 25, 2026

Dope writeup from Boomkat

If Konono No.1 got down with Einstürzende Neubauten and African Head Charge, they might sound strikingly similar to KINACT; a Kinshasa-based art collective emblematic of Nyege Nyege Tapes’ DIY Kongo tekno touchstones on this raucous, ravishing debut LP.

KINACT are an eleven-part ensemble of performers operating at the confluence of music, kinetic art and sound sculpture on the streets of Kinshasa - historic megacity of the DRC, with a population of 18.5M and rising. Helmed by Eddy Ekete since 2015, the group are renowned for utilising Kinshasa’s public spaces as a living theatre, ingeniously adapting detritus as instruments-come-costumes in street processions that “bear witness to pollution, superstition, gendered violence and postcolonial scars.” Somehow also calling to mind Rammellzee or Tetsuo The Ironman in their outlandish modern aesthetic, their music follows with a contemporary cyborganic crankiness and road-spawned purpose that, like Kinshasa’s junkyard heroes Konono No.1 before them, vividly translates to the world far beyond the DRC with transfixing energy.

A fleeting ‘Musique Du Congo’ initiates an 11-part ritual of drilling percussive attacks and chants, where a makeshift workshop of motorcycle parts, saws and jerry-built idiophonics syncopate a hypnotic industrial klang. It’s all there in the name and pounding thrust of ‘Atelier Kinact,’ a definitive statement of intent for proceedings that take in the wickedly febrile street scene of ‘Gaingai’ and more curious pockets of intrigue in the squashed, panting hunch and slurred rap of ‘La Marche Inévitable’ and mad drum circle styles of ‘Cercle de Tambour Kinact avec Manza et Ikembe,’ plunging us into the thick of it with the martial tattoo of ‘Kinshasa La Nuit’. And it just keeps on giving right until the end, with the concrète noise of ‘Femme Électronique’ calling to mind Warrior Queen x Marina Rosenfeld overseen by Z’Ev, tilting off into the spectral unknown with a timber-shivering ‘Les Cloches (Spiritus' Invocation)’ to finish us off.

Deadly.

OotyPa · Mar 27, 2026

out now. it absolutely rips

got album of the week on The Quietus
https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/kinact-kinshasa-in-action-review/

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KINACT - Kinshasa in Action (March 27, 2026)

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