Roaring Abyss
2015, 87 minutes
An immersion into the deepest sounds of contemporary Ethiopia.
If you go out around music bars and venues in Addis Ababa, you will enjoy a very characteristic scene, but if you want to get an idea of the different sounds from the country, you will get a very narrow view of it; in some places some Amhara or Gurage music may be found but ... what about the rest? There are more than eighty different nationalities and cultures spread all along the mountains, deserts and forests of Ethiopia. Nowadays many of the traditional instruments in Ethiopia have been replaced for electronic keyboards, and many local traditional bands have been reduced to a front(wo)man singing along to a keyboard which plays beats and melodies all in one. But there are still some musicians spread along the country playing the music they learned from their fathers and mothers; intruments like the Krar, Washent, Masinko or Kabero, are nowadays roaring and bouncing against the hills of this land full of contrasts and diversity. In order to unveil the music universe and keep a record of this endangered music tradition, we spent two years performing field recordings around every corner of Ethiopia, documented in this audiovisual poem.
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