The penultimate track on Kibrom Birhane’s Lisané Bahir, ‘AMEN’, has the voices of Ethiopian elders giving blessings over a slow swinging drum machine. A sequencer bubbles out a rubbery pattern beneath sparking keyboard flourishes, soaring pads arrive carrying a lofty vocal. The track’s origins came in a recent trip back home to Ethiopia by California-based Birhane, where he noticed he wasn’t hearing these blessings as much as he did when he was growing up there. He recorded them as a reminder for a younger generation.
Preservation is one of the motivations behind Birhane’s fourth album, continuation is another. Lisané Bahir’s title translates to ‘the sound created when earth and water meet’ in Geez, an ancient Ethiopian language still used in Ethiopian Orthodox Church services. He plays melodies built from Ethiopian ancestral modes on synths, but more than embalming these traditions for posterity, he captures them as ongoing, catalytic, alive. We don’t just hear how Ethiopian musical modes change when played by a synth, we hear how synthesizer music changes when it plays Ethiopian scales.
Birhane wrote the album’s melodies using four modes: Tezeta, Anchihoye, Bati and Ambassel. These scales appear through the history of Ethiopian music. Mulatu Astatke used them as the basis to develop Ethio-jazz. Birhane’s previous albums, such as the luminous Here And There from 2022, played by a brassy, mostly acoustic ensemble, feel directly in dialogue with the tones Astatke works with. Lisané Bahir diverges. Much of the album was recorded using the Studio110, a large, room-filling modular synthesizer, with other electronics such as talk-box and Moogs embellishing the ebullient sound.
For the first three tracks we hear Birhane testing the possibilities of the combination, moving from the hypnotic, almost reggae-like syncopations and vocoder voice of ‘JABAADHU’ into the dramatic, expansive soundscape of ‘HORIZON’ and on into ‘ADDIS ZEMEN’s tapestry of arpeggios and cross-weaving, beautifully wobbly melodies. The following tracks bounce and roam around those coordinates, dancing on an unlikely intersection of the levity of Ethio-jazz and the machinery and grids of synthesizer music, reaching a glowing highpoint on the pulsating ‘VORTEX’, featuring Esy Tadesse’s strident vocals.
With Astatke’s Ethio-jazz, Ethiopian music changed jazz as much as jazz changed Ethiopian music, and something similar happens to synths on Lisané Bahir. Framing the record as old meeting new doesn’t quite sit right, because Lisané Bahir doesn’t sound like any other synth record I’ve heard. Both histories weaving into it are shown to be ongoing and shaping each other. It isn’t a case of ancient Ethiopian modes being reanimated through exposure to modern tools. It’s a two-way process, both components of the equation are shown to be active participants. Birhane suggests new possibilities for synthesizers as much as new possibilities for traditional Ethiopian music.
