Mikael Seifu: "The Lost Drum Beat"
Most of the time, invention isn’t a matter of making something new but of turning something old a little to the left: Two tin cans become a telephone; a chain of Hs make a ladder. You recognize the thing, but the context eludes you. See: “The Lost Drum Beat”, a scrambled, ethereal piece of dance music that strikes a match of recognition but doesn’t seem connected to any obvious story or lineage. (Four Tet, maybe; Burial, distantly, but with none of that dragging historicity or nostalgia.)
Mikael Seifu, an Ethiopian producer living in Addis Ababa after college in Mahwah, N.J., says his style is more strongly connected to Ethiopian folk music than European techno (which means I’ll be listening to more Ethiopian folk music soon—I want to at least glimpse the angle from which he’s shooting). You don’t play tracks like this on repeat; you don’t need to. Instead, you play them twice and wonder: What else is this man thinking?
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