172: Unknown tape, by Hirut Bekele

Hirut Bekele (Ethiopia)
Unknown tape
12 tracks, 59 minutes
Listen and download at Awesome Tapes from Africa

Here’s a difficult one: how do you write about an album you have no idea what it is? No title, no date, no track names. All I know is that it is by the singer Hirut Bekele. Let’s try.

The version of this tape that I have – and that you can have too, courtesy of Awesome Tapes from Africa – is not good quality at all, it’s fuzzy, muddy and a little distorted, but the standard of the music cannot help but shine through. The ensemble is three, as Hirut’s voice is backed by just an electronic organ and a krar lyre; the sound is actually quite sparse in most places, but if anything, that only serves to highlight Hirut’s captivating voice. Her singing is quite understated in a way, it’s sweet and soulful, but she can’t half belt it out when she needs to, and put on quite an attitude when she wants to.

I find these recordings most spellbinding when the pieces are based on the more semitone-rich scales such as those on tracks 2, 5 and 9, which use the scales of anchihoye, a variation on bati (with a major seventh), and ambassel, respectively, for all you musicologists out there (a handy guide to the Ethiopian qeñet scales can be found on this website). And then there’s the wild, guttural introduction to track 11, which I think harkens to the vocalisations of eskista dancers, but it come out of the blue and doesn’t come back, either. There’s a lot of lightly strange things about this tape, and I love it.

It’s so hard to find any information about Hirut Bekele, though. When I visited Ethiopia, I tried asking in every music shop about recordings by her. No-one had any, although they all remarked on what a legend she was. One of them told me it’s because of some confusing legal matters about who owned the recordings, that when she died, the licenses were inherited by someone unexpected or something, but I find that a strange excuse, especially seeing as Ethiopia’s music trade seems to be almost exclusively run on pirated copies. Who knows what’s going on? Either way, I would love to know – and hear – more about Hirut and her music, a legend with a fantastic voice but an enigmatic profile.