Niwel Tsumbu – Milimo

Diatribe

Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu has been based in Ireland for the last twenty years and it would seem that the desire for travel and the stimuli of being a collaborative player in a European country has opened his mind and heart to a whole wealth of influences. Those influences, be they home-grown like soukous or more wide-ranging like flamenco or jazz, have enabled his elegantly fluid playing to become truly continent-spanning yet unique to him.

The album is a series of standalone vignettes, some of which are way under a minute but fuse together to create a journey through this singular guitarist’s life. One of the first things you notice is the speed of his fingerwork; on first listen, I thought I detected him bouncing something off the fret-board, but on closer inspection it was just sheer dexterity. It isn’t all crazy speed though, things do slow down sometimes to a crawl and the textures created veer from the purest of tones to distorted string buzz.

Hard strumming, bluff tones and a love of repetition abound, which sounds almost medieval at points as if the tuning were unusual. At others, the attack of the fret-board and the experimental chord progressions hint at something fresh, a desire to push in new directions. It all runs together like an adventurous mix-tape with the pretty yet yearning minute and a half of “Tirizah” urging the forty-second progression of “Étude 1” straight into the only vocal track on the album, the traditional “Mastah” where we are introduced to Niwel’s lovely voice, double-tracked over a playful repetitive motif. You can feel the joy in the playing, but also the quest.

It sounds like rhythm, bass and lead all together on the modernist “Polyphony” but “Gracias Paco” has a Spanish country feel. It all seems so effortless, the dexterity, the chord selections, the tangential wanderings, the textural flourishes. You feel there is a low boredom threshold and there are rapid changes in emotion and atmosphere, as if he has all these ideas and only the shortest of time to put them all down.

Interestingly though, penultimate track “The Ssilence Within” opens right up and suddenly there is space and echo; we can hear the body of the guitar and the air shimmering around the strings and it feels as if this could have been a whole other avenue, one which perhaps will be saved for next time. Until then, just revel in the mellifluous tones and scattershot dexterity and allow it to work its magic.

-Mr Olivetti-