Even as African music continues to push itself to new heights, there is still so much left to discover on the continent. Across its many corners, artists and creatives are constantly pushing the boundaries of what African music can sound like. Yet, too often, some of the most interesting strides are being made by independent collectives working outside the traditional structures of the music industry.

This is the case with The Neossinia Mixtape, a new body of work that aims to explore what Ethiopian music can sound like in the modern world, while creating space for a new generation of Ethiopian creatives to define that sound for themselves.

“Ethiopia is the second-largest country in Africa, but when you talk about music, we don’t really talk about Ethiopian contemporary music,” says Denkinesh Argaw, one of the executive producers of the project. “A lot of it is because the sound maybe doesn’t really cross over. Ethiopian music is really big, but it’s very nostalgic. It’s very reminiscent. There isn’t necessarily a new version of Ethiopia with a contemporary sound.”

The process behind the mixtape was one that required more than a twenty artists working in a writing camp (sixteen ended up on the mixtape), three weeks of songwriting and a willingness to push beyond familiar creative territory. The camp brought artists, producers and writers together with the intention of challenging them to experiment, expand their horizons and explore sounds and techniques they may not have naturally encountered or worked with before.

In that sense, the journey was just as creatively fulfilling as the destination was intended to be culturally impactful. The result is The Neossinia Mixtape, released this Friday as part of New Music Friday, with an ambitious goal: to challenge what audiences think Ethiopian music sounds like and expand their understanding of what contemporary Ethiopian culture can be.

Rather than attempting to manufacture a new Ethiopian sound from scratch, Neossinia is interested in what happens when Ethiopia’s rich musical history meets the instincts of a new generation of artists. The project draws from traditional sounds and instruments across different regions, while allowing those influences to sit alongside Afrobeats, R&B, hip-hop and other contemporary genres.

That makes the mixtape as much about cultural exchange as it is about music. It brings together artists and creatives from Ethiopia and the diaspora, creating a space where different interpretations of Ethiopian identity can meet, collide and evolve.

For Argaw, however, Neossinia is not an attempt to declare the arrival of an Ethiopian creative scene. That scene already exists.

“Within Ethiopia, there’s an amazing cultural and artistic renaissance happening already,” she says. “It’s a much larger ecosystem that we’re trying to fit ourselves into, rather than trying to create an ecosystem. The ecosystem is already existing.”

The artists involved in the project, alongside its photographers, videographers, stylists, creative directors and other collaborators, are all part of that wider movement. The Neossinia Mixtape simply brings some of those people together around a shared creative experiment.

“We’re bringing together a lot of the players that are cultivating that together and creating our interpretation of what that looks like collaboratively,” Argaw says.

At its core, the project is asking a deceptively simple question: What does Ethiopian music sound like when it is allowed to look forward?

For a country with dozens of languages, cultures and musical traditions, there may never be one definitive answer. Instead, Neossinia makes the case for multiplicity: for an Ethiopian sound that can be rooted in its history while remaining contemporary, experimental and legible to audiences far beyond its borders.

In this interview, Denkinesh Argaw, one of the three executive producers of The Neossinia Mixtape, discusses how the project came together, the thinking behind its songwriting camp, Ethiopia’s evolving musical landscape and what she hopes the mixtape can change about the way the world hears Ethiopian music.

AMPLIFY AFRICA: Can you tell me a little bit about how this project came together?

DENKINESH ARGAW: The company that I run is called 2591 Worldwide. We’re basically a creative agency and media platform that highlights Ethiopian and Eritrean creatives, particularly those in the diaspora.

We partnered with Bana Records, a local record label in Ethiopia, and Forward Music Company, another diaspora company based in the DMV. We came together with the idea of putting together a songwriting camp.

Ford Music Company had done a songwriting camp the year before, which I saw and had been wanting to do for some time. I reached out to ET, who runs the company and is a friend of mine, and said, “Hey, I want to get into this. Can we put together a camp this year?”

Then we reached out to Bana Records and Blén, the CEO there, and that’s kind of how it came about. We said, “Let’s put together a writing camp. Let’s see how we can push the boundaries of Ethiopian music and just see what happens.”

A lot of the artists who were selected were people within our network that we had been watching for some time, or people Bana Records had collaborated with in the past. We also put out an open call on Instagram.

We ended up with 16 artists, producers and writers in a studio for three days. The mixtape that came out of it was the result of that.

AMPLIFY AFRICA: How do you feel about the final product?

DENKINESH ARGAW: Speaking for myself, I feel good about it. I feel proud of what these artists accomplished. The idea was that Afrobeats is really big in Nigeria and amapiano is big in South Africa, and we started asking: what represents Ethiopia?

Ethiopia is the second-largest country in Africa, but when you talk about music, we don’t really talk about Ethiopian contemporary music. When it comes to Ethiopia, you ask, “Why is that?” A lot of it is because the sound maybe doesn’t really cross over. Ethiopian music is really big, but it’s very nostalgic. It’s very reminiscent. There isn’t necessarily a new version of Ethiopia with a contemporary sound.

So that was the idea: How can we do that?

We weren’t trying to come out of this with a whole new sound. It was more about creating your own version, your own interpretation, and starting the conversation around how we can do this and how we can collaborate. It really got the artists thinking about it in a way that they probably hadn’t before. A lot of these artists do Afrobeats really well, or R&B or hip-hop. But for the first time, we were saying, “No, combine your traditional sounds with something that’s culturally relevant, that would cross over, that would make sense in a global context, and not just create it for an Ethiopian market.” Considering all of that, doing it in three days with artists, some of who had never met each other before, I’m really proud of what they created.

 AMPLIFY AFRICA: What does pushing the boundaries of the sound look like in your camps? What are some of the big genres in the Ethiopian music market?

BLÉN: Pushing the boundaries in our camp means encouraging artists to step outside of their comfort zones, experiment, and create new sounds that can speak to both the local and international markets. At the same time, we want to foster a truly collaborative environment, where everyone is working toward a shared goal: representing Ethiopia and its culture while pursuing global recognition.

Some of the biggest genres in the Ethiopian market are rooted in the traditional music of the country’s diverse ethnic groups and cultural traditions. These sounds are sometimes presented in their purest form, and at other times fused with foreign genres and contemporary influences. As a country with a history of never being colonized, we have a particularly strong connection to our cultural identity, and there is a deep appreciation for music that preserves and celebrates that identity in its most authentic form. That is something we should be proud of.

AMPLIFY AFRICA: What would you hope the impact of the project would be? Is there something you would like it to shift or make people a little more open to?

DENKINESH ARGAW: I would like for people to open their perception of what Ethiopian music sounds like.

It’s kind of a hard thing because Ethiopia is a country with around 80 different tribes, languages and cultures. I think that’s been one of the big reasons why it’s hard to create a single sound. It’s difficult to bring all those different influences into one package. But I want people to look at Ethiopia and see the beauty that’s there, and to learn more about the culture. A lot of that is done through music, the arts, film and things like that.

I think this is an opportunity for the diaspora and the people in Ethiopia to connect over something and create this shared global experience through music. It’s also a way to enter Ethiopia into the conversation around African music, and I think that’s very important. I want to enter Ethiopia into the conversation around African music as a contender, as a place where we have a sound that can translate outside of Ethiopia as well.

AMPLIFY AFRICA: Are there any other Ethiopian albums or EPs, either new or old, that you would consider essential listening? Something that would give people more context sonically for this project?

DENKINESH ARGAW: I think what’s really popular right now, and what people identify Ethiopian music with, is Ethio-jazz. I know that’s trending on TikTok and social media in general. So, Mulatu Astatke, Hailu Mergia. All of the Ethio-jazz greats. I think that is a very distinctly Ethiopian sound. You just hear it and you know it. Then you go into more of the oldies, like Mahmoud Ahmed and Aster Aweke. You’re going from the ’80s to the ’90s to the early 2000s, and that era had a really distinct sound.

Then you have the more traditional sounds from the countryside: traditional Ethiopian music with traditional instruments. All of this is kind of a combination of that in a sense. There are influences from the Oromo people, influences from the Wolaita area, which is down south in Ethiopia, and you can hear it in the different rhythms. A lot of it is pulling from hip-hop and R&B, and there’s even kind of a reclamation of Ethio-jazz. There’s a group called Zena, and they’re doing really cool things in the space of modernizing Ethio-jazz or creating their own rendition of what modern Ethio-jazz sounds like. But I think the only one that’s really translated internationally is Ethio-jazz. A big part of this project is creating a sound that goes global and makes sense in an international context, and I think Ethio-jazz is the best example of that.

We’re trying to find the middle ground: something that redefines what a sound can be domestically, but also goes internationally and still makes sense outside of Ethiopian audiences.

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Image Courtesy of 2591 Worldwide