Some Reviews With Jimmy For Reals: Mikael Seifu

Some Reviews With Jimmy For Reals: Mikael Seifu – Yarada Lij

Posted by: Jimmy For Reals on September 6, 2014

Not sure I’ve heard much if any Ethiopian music, but its probably safe to say that it doesn’t sound a whole lot like this. Hailing from Addis Ababa, Mikael Seifu has been busy brewing up the sort of heady beats that belong on only the most adventurous soundsystems, presumably in the sort of venue that you wander into by accident and can never find again in the sober light of day. The four tracks on Yarada Lij veer wildly from tangible to wholly otherwise but are all stamped with the sonic identity of an artist intent on mashing the best bits of post 2000 electronic music into an array of Ethopian sounds.

Dropleton is an Abstract House burner alive with curious interference, like a radio dial set quarter-way between wee hours Kiss FM and some errant intercontinental signal being pulsed from a malfunctioning satellite array on the other side of the globe. Darkness Iz is the sort of crookedly galloping, avant beat-jumble you might expect from Blue Daisy at his most adventurous, title track Yarada Lij is audio porn for ethnomusicologists, but what really takes the piss is the 10 minute ambient reverie of Wedagn, which is sort of like having a cyclic vision about something familiar and yet wholly other, you know, like that time that James Blake’s Sparing All The Horses got retrograde amnesia in the sea fog off the Horn of Africa and wandered into someone else’s daydream about heat hazes rising from distant lands.

Yarada Lij is out now on 1432r