Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Souvenirs [MISSISSIPPI]

Why you'll love it

This Mississippi Records LP comes in a gold shimmer jacket with a 16-page booklet of lyrics, transliterations and translations. Pitchfork gave it 9.0, and it is the one album of hers built around her own singing voice.

This edition

• Gold shimmer jacket
• 16-page booklet
• Lyrics with transliterations and translations

About the album

Most of us keep a box of old tapes somewhere. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru's turned out to hold an album. After she died in Jerusalem in March 2023, aged 99, these recordings surfaced among the cassettes in her cell at Kidane Mehret Church; in her lifetime she had sold them on homemade CD-Rs.

She wrote and recorded the eight songs at her family's home in Addis Ababa between 1977 and 1985, singing in Amharic into a boombox set on top of the piano while she played. "Clouds Moving On The Sky" and "Is It Sunny Or Cloudy In The Land You Live?" drift with her familiar rolling, rubato touch, while "Ethiopia My Motherland" carries a quiet pride through years when she and her family could not leave the country. Cyrus Moussavi and Thomas Feng produced the reissue, with the tapes digitized by Albina Music Trust.

The Quietus called it a document of exile and war made by a virtuoso in supposed privacy. Recorded on a boombox, mind you, which ought to give the rest of us pause before upgrading the stereo again.

Also at Kops: more Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru on vinyl · browse World

Tracklist

Listen

On Mississippi Records (cat# MRI-201).