Intonal Festival 2022: Fulu Miziki

The Kinshasa group perform at the Malmö festival with their orchestra of DIY instruments constructed from salvaged items.

In the second in a series of highlights from Malmö’s Intonal Festival, we present a performance from multidisciplinary Kinshasa collective Fulu Miziki. The Afro-Futurist collective, whose name roughly translates as “music from the garbage,” are famed for their DIY ethos, constructing their instruments and costumes from salvaged objects.

Fulu Miziki’s instrumentation changes as their music evolves, and has included guembris built out of computer casings, keyboards constructed from wood, springs and aluminium pipes and flip-flops used as percussion pads. For their latest EP, Ngbaka, the group experimented with electronic textures and production techniques, recruiting Sekelembele and DJ Final to help create a hybrid sound that was developed in Kampala during Covid-19 lockdown.

Intonal has been one of the highlights of Sweden’s electronic music calendar since it was first held in 2015, inviting international artists to perform alongside the country’s own pool of innovative experimental artists. Run by the team behind the intimate Inkonst venue, Intonal’s programme sees a host of commissions, one-off performances and club nights take place across the city.

Intonal’s 2022 festival was its first full edition since 2019, with 2020 cancelled and 2021 taking place in a hybrid format due to the pandemic. “The whole point of a festival is to bring people together – a proclamation so self-evident that one would never reflect upon it under ordinary circumstances. But the last two years have given us cause to do just that,” the festival team says.

For more information on Intonal, visit the festival website. Follow Fulu Miziki on Instagram.

Filmed by Jonatan Gyllenör and Henrik Hellström.