Noir et Blanc was released in 1983, yet it still sounds like a broadcast from the future. The work of Congolese and French musicians using analog synthesizers, strange effects, stranger time signatures, and acoustic instruments—steel guitar, clarinet, kalimba—and singing over them in Swahili, Kikongo, Lingala, and pidgin French, it reappears now not so much as a reissue, but as a boomerang across space and time. The title, which translates as “black and white,” doesn’t do justice to a collision of sounds and ideas that yields something more like an iridescent spray of color, like a firehose shot across a beam of sunlight. Far from binary opposites, its composite parts break down into a thousand dynamic shades of grey. It is an album that unseats assumptions.

• A1 M'Pasi Ya M'Pamba
• A2 Mangungu
• A3 Dju Ya Feza
• A4 Munipe Wa Kati
• B1 Eh! Yaye
• B2 Mama Lenvo
• B3 Lamuka
• B4 Keba
• B5 Woa