Experimental Ethiopian musician MIKAEL SEIFU offers up another gleaming celebration of a track that shares the same name as his new EP, 'The Lost Drum Beat'.
The haunting opening is a kaleidoscope of notes rushing in and out, whilst a squawking buzzer sets off and intricately layered drums buzz to get the pace going, sounding more like a continuous rush of bells than traditional beats.
Boiler Room, purveyors of edgy new music, unearthed the track and it’d be easy to call 'The Lost Drum Beat' an esoteric, foreign and strange track, simply because it’s coming out of Ethiopia and, let’s be honest, how many other Ethiopian producers can you name off the top of your head. The vocals consist of a series of ghostly repeated ‘ah’s and ‘oh’s, adding to the sense of madness and bristling creative energy; we all know there’s a thin line between genius and madness, and for me this track lands in the latter. It’s the culmination of intricate instrumentation and far-fetched beat making, condensed into a club-ready track.
The title track from the EP is a cyclical and engulfing number, which develops into a serene mid section. Though this is primed for the dance floors of some edgy world music club nights, Seifu is more indebted to Ethiopian folk music than European dance or techno, and it’s a masterful journey through reinterpretation.
The Addis-Ababa beat maker returns to Washington DC label 1432 R to release The Lost Drum Beat EP, having put out his debut EP, Yarada Lij, with them last year. The B-side to the current EP, ‘Brass’, is a 13-minute slow builder, that evolves from minimalist beats into a UK garage fused with Ethiopian folk hung together on looping saxophone sirens.
Both the single and its B-side are out now via 1432 R.
Words by Katie Rowley
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