dragonchild

As leader for US group Debo Band, DA Mekonnen mined his ancestral heritage to deliver a spirited and tasteful update of classic 1970s Ethiopian pop sounds. His latest project uses similar building blocks but mines a broader, more experimental path.

While bright Ethiopian jazz refrains and rhythms remain the key elements of tracks such as ‘Unicode 1200’ and ‘LTD’, elsewhere he cloaks his distinctive saxophone playing in layers of techno synths and digital beats (‘The Source’ and ‘Sera’) or mires them in echoed dub effects to create ambient dreamscapes (‘Hopefulness’). If the album occasionally suffers from these dramatic leaps in style it certainly can't be faulted for ambition. The 14-minute album centrepiece ‘Meditation (Reprise)’, a collaboration with experimental musician claire rousay, pairs Mekonnen's deep saxophone lines with a sound collage of field recordings, metallic rattles and synth drones to create a deeply immersive listening experience. The 20-minute epic ‘Meditation (Ancestor)’ that closes the album takes the form of an extended saxophone meditation – a long passage of free jazz extemporisation segueing into deep waves of interlocking saxophones that recall Indian tanpura drones. Signalling the dragonchild album's experimental nature, the physical release features a vinyl four-LP set, titled BLACK, that contains one 20-minute piece of music revealed when all of the four albums are played simultaneously.