"The people instinctively love freedom," Kwame Ture once declared. In his speech, "Converting the Unconscious to the Conscious," the radical civil rights leader otherwise known as Stokely Carmichael goes on to say that, "You can only win freedom on reason. Therefore […] The job of the conscious"—those who react on reason—"is to make the unconscious conscious." These are also the opening remarks of Mikael Seifu’s latest EP, Zelalem, which is itself a quest for enlightenment and freedom.
"Zelalem" translates to "eternity" in Amharic, and the cover of the EP depicts an infinity sign overlapping with a pair of eyes digitally rendered in the style of old Ethiopian Orthodox Church paintings. It’s also an accurate description of the Addis producer’s musical ethos. The 28-year-old makes what he and his peers call "Ethiopiyawi Electronic," which crosses Ethiopian folk and religious traditions with electronica. Seifu’s particular take recalls something of the experimental ingenuity of Mexico City collective NAAFI, with a profound respect for his own city’s historic and sonic pulse. In the past, Seifu has often used UK garage as a rhythmic template (see: "Tuff Ruff," 2015’s The Lost Drum Beat, parts of 2014’s Yarada Lij EP), but Zelalem moves more freely, untethered to any one temporal structure. It collapses not only the past and the present, but also different sacred and secular music forms, and, importantly, the artist’s inner and outer worlds.
In the first half of the five-track EP, we literally hear Seifu's focus shift from the physical world around him to the murkier one inside. "The Solipsist" opens with anonymous, monochromatic cafe chatter: "En'ne'NE'ga'ger, En'ne'NE'ga'ger, En'ne'NE'ga'ger"—"Let’s talk, let’s talk, let’s talk." A bass player warms up nearby, and street sounds tumble in whenever the door swishes open. Slowly, in a sort of drawn-out Proustian moment, the artist’s past rises to meet him: a low liturgical drone emerges as if from thin air; a krar (lyre) melody bubbles to the surface; his reverie thickens; and the listener sinks in deeper with him.
So it comes as something of a shock when Seifu breaks the mood on "Soul Manifest (ft. L.A.)" with a dramatized soliloquy: "It was all a dream/ It was all a dream," he intones. "Released from the wonders of strife/ I wander through your might/ Beginning to see the light/ I stop to wonder…" These musings help give listeners a narrative to latch on to, but Seifu already does such a vivid job of creating this dream state, that the speechifying instead comes off as heavy-handed. Luckily, the moment itself becomes a distant memory in the wake of the tizita that follows, which is as tender as it is ardent. A tizita is a song of love, longing, and nostalgia, and Seifu’s reimagining of the popular song form acts like a portal that opens up yet another emotional dimension for him.
That sense of illumination is the focus of the EP’s front half, but it is on the back half that these various spaces and memories reach critical mass, imploding and consequently expanding the scope of Seifu’s musical universe. On "How to Save a Life (Vector of Eternity)," a bowed one-string mesenqo saws through a wall of kebero drumming and rattling shakers. Flecks of washint flute catch light among colorful washes of synth. On title track and closer "ዘላለም (Vector of Light)," everything comes to a head. Voices chant and exalt in wide sweeping arcs punctuated by sharp hiccuping breaths, marked by insistent repetition. At the very end, the mesenqo from earlier returns, careening into a clanging pile-up that sounds not unlike an accordion being exorcized—in the best way. The whole track, like the EP, feels like a rite of passage. But rather than landing upright, transformed yet somehow unscathed, its architect disappears into the ether, already off through the next portal to another dimension somewhere closer to freedom.
