La Roche - Liye Liye (2022)

La Roche's debut solo album "Liye Liye" is a psychedelic mystery tour into the Democratic Republic of Congo's furthest experimental fringes. Like DJ Finale, the producer is part of Kinshasa based collective Fulu Miziki, and grabs ideas from the DRC's opulent musical history, refashioning them into rousing electronic vignettes that sounds completely out of time.

The title track is built around an emotional chant of "liye, liye" that drifts around a glacial electronic beat that sounds like DJ Screw making day zero grime, all 909 percussion and shattering glass. But tracks like 'Figuyr', 'Olambaka Bien' and 'Esperimante Abbe' are harder to place; the backbone is firmly rooted in Congolese traditional sounds but these percussive cycles are de-materialized into distant lands. 'Figuyr' occasionally flickers with soukouk, but also throbs with the melancholy bleep techno wonk of LFO, Sweet Exorcist and A Guy Called Gerald.

'Elela' and 'Fox de Moroto' are even further removed from reality, assembled from crashing sheets of noise, digital watch alarms, car horns and gunshots that trip around hoarse screams and rattling kicks. This is unpredictable and gleefully unhinged music that paints a vivid, pineal tickling four dimensional picture of Congolese culture in 2022.