Victor Kunonga’s music is not easy to pin down to a particular ‘style’. Listeners may associate Victor with a chimurenga style, but ‘different’. Yet Victor’s music is not chimurenga, really. It follows its own path.
The main characteristic of his music derives from cross-cutting mbira patterns employed on two lead guitars, or guitar and mbira, with interwoven bass and drum lines. He departs from typical chimurenga patterns to create a hybrid of sounds, with clever and unexpected use of spaces and times signatures, and complex poly-rhythms through the interlocking guitars.
In a broader and historic music sense Victor’s real legacy is closer to the legendary Zimbabwean guitar bands of the 1970s and 80s, and his guitar sound and style, while chimurenga-patterned in parts, owes much to this generation who performed before him.
Lyrically, Victor Kunonga’s social commentary is poetic and profound, but accessible, painting a poignant vocal picture of what he observes as he touches the pulse of society, charting its trajectory.
Victor has taken mbira-derived and other forms of Zimbabwe’s guitar culture to totally new and unexpected destinations and created a deep and rich tapestry, a soundscape of truly Zimba- bwean sounds rooted in the rocks and trees that surround us. He has thus created a unique blend of musical odyssey describable not by genre but identifiable by just two words- Victor Kunonga.
"Making music for me is like drawing and painting a picture on canvas, sometimes abstract, but understood"
By Paul Brickhill
.
