Noir et Blanc

Recorded in 1983 by the composer Hector Zazou in collaboration with French synth experimentalists Guillaume Loizillon and Claude Micheli (aka CY1) and the Congolese singer Bony Bikaye, the ground-breaking Afro-electronic fusion of Noir et Blanc is a prime example of why a group of music industry professionals felt the need to invent a new genre term to describe music that fitted nowhere in the standard record-store classifications of the time. They came up, of course, with ‘world music’ and this is a hybrid landmark in its genesis: in which Fela's Afrobeat tropes and the polyrhythms of the Burundi drummers meet Kraftwerk and the electro-punk of DAF. The only recording from the era remotely like it is possibly Brian Eno and David Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. What's astonishing is that, more than three decades on, the minimalist beats, mutant electronica and global textures sound so totally of our time that these recordings would not seem out of place if dropped into a modern DJ set. Indeed, you might reasonably think it was a smart, genre-bending mash-up of Congotronics, Steve Reich and TV on the Radio made by a bunch of 2017 hipsters who had climbed aboard Damon Albarn's Africa Express.