Kingdom Molongi – Kembo

Since 2009 the Portuguese musician Jonathan Uliel Saldanha has been the creative director of HHY & The Macumbas, in recent years extending their penchant for dubby rituals and buzzing or blaring horns over a couple of albums as HHY & The Kampala Unit for Nyege Nyege Tapes, where he has collaborated with the trumpeter Florence Nandawula to offer a steeply syncopated and forward-facing take on traditional rhythm making as brass and percussion have bolted onto bristling electronics for a riveting exploration of techno or dub offshoots from trance and jungle to gqom.

Yet the Porto-based creator has also harboured a passion for choral music, with his compositions including ‘Khôros Anima’ for mixed choir in the empty space of a former textile factory and ‘Sancta Viscera Tua’ an ambitious project for 150 voices which premiered at the church of Santa Clara do Porto, a Unesco world heritage site which was once part of a Clarissan nunnery and is renowned for its gilded woodwork.

For his new album Saldanha has teamed up with the Kingdom Ulfame Choir, a seven-strong group of Congolese singers presently based in Uganda, under the monicker Kingdom Molongi as the fulfilment of a project which began in Nyege Nyege Tape’s famous Kampala studio. The result seems to encompass in ten songs the recorded history of vocal music, from gospel to sea shanties as the Kingdom Ulfame Choir shape their crosswise chants and layered melodies over contemporary electronics, deepening bass and whirring lute-like drones.

The spiritual exclamations of ‘Hosana’ evoke ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’ and other songs performed by Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, as captured by the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, while ‘Nzambe Bolingo’ blends a bit of beatboxing with what sounds like Inuk throat singing and ‘Volca outi Wapi’ stretches in the direction of Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush. Perhaps that’s no surprise, as the collaboration between Saldanha and the Kingdom Ulfame Choir began with them singing together in an imagined language which was concocted from elements of Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo and French while they also drew in their approach from liturgical music and glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Elsewhere there are traces of soul and gospel or even hip hop and hyperpop, with Visions and Aretha Franklin and the Sunday Service Choir album Jesus Is Born among the more obvious touchstones.