London to Addis
No Hats No Hoods Records (61 mins/87 mins via Bandcamp)
This is a simple idea with a great pay-off: record traditional Ethiopian krar (five-stringed lyre), washint (wooden flute), masenko (one-stringed fiddle) and kebero (drums) during one intense week in Addis Ababa, hand those recordings over to a load of big-name grime producers and let them go nuts.
The resulting instrumentals use the samples as springboards for so many different directions. Some tracks retain quite a lot of recognisably Ethiopian qualities, whereas others sound almost completely unrelated. Considering that each track has its own producer with their own way of approaching the material, the whole thing holds together really well as an hour-long set.
The mix of the grime electronics with the unique Ethiopian scales and rhythms actually ends up sounding akin to dark, apocalyptic dubstep. It’s really exciting to hear these pioneers of a distinctly London-rooted genre take on something so far removed and coming up with interesting, unexpected results – a great example is Ignorants’ ‘Uncolonised’, supposedly the very first grime track in 3/4 time.
London to Addis is the first of a whole series of British Council-funded Ethio-grime collaborations, and I can’t wait to hear what else is to come; it would be brilliant to hear MCs get their lips around some of the instrumentals presented here.