Frederiksberg Records is proud to announce the first ever vinyl reissue of Admas’ “Sons of Ethiopia”, the privately pressed
album from 1984. Fully licensed from Admas, released with their support,
the album includes restored sound and art. The extensively researched booklet features unseen photographs and interviews with the band.
Sons of Ethiopia is a mostly instrumental album, rich with global
influences. It is one of the few recordings to be produced outside
Ethiopia in the early 1980s. It is a key document of the Washington DC
exile scene. The core members of Admas – Tewodros ‘Teddy’ Aklilu, Henock
Temesgen, and Abegasu Shiota – had previously played in a group called
Gasha, one of the few local Ethiopian bands. Admas was born from Gasha,
as an outlet for their more experimental instincts.
Emerging from the community of Ethiopian exiles who fled the
brutality of the Derg – the military dictatorship that had deposed Haile
Selassie – the album was the sound of a new generation. The members of
Admas were not musicians from the ‘golden age’: they were children of
the terror of the Derg time. Their music formed during an era of
state-sponsored neighbourhood bands and a propaganda-tinged traditional
music scene, where the weekends were sound-tracked by the remaining
hotel groups of a bygone Imperial world.
Admas took Ethiopian popular music into wholly new territory. Having
established a residency at the Red Sea restaurant in the early 1980s,
the Admas players were steeped in the polyglot musical culture of the
American capital. The diverse sonic influences of the city filter into
the music, making the album a radically modern work of Ethiopian
fusion.Mulatu, Girma Beyene and their peers in 1960s Addis Ababa had
created an Ethiopian pop sound by using rhythms from Latin music, soul
and jazz. Admas threw their net wider still, adding highlife, electro,
go-go, samba, and roots reggae to the mix.
Sons of Ethiopia is the fresh sound of youth, freedom and
imagination, which the band made for themselves and by themselves,
owning every part of the process. But it is also a music of exile. Admas
performed week in, week out, for crowds of fellow Ethiopians, many of
whom had lost family and friends to the Derg. Sons of Ethiopia channels
this loss, longing and hope. It is at once imbued with the melancholy
and nostalgia so typical of Ethiopian song. And at the same time, is a
joyful work of synthesis and experiment with deep roots.
