Roaring Abyss

This musical road movie takes us across Ethiopia, a nation with a population of ninety million and eighty different languages. Roaring Abyss is full of field recordings of all forms of traditional music – from wind orchestras from the time of Emperor Haile Selassie to the Azmari, the Ethiopian equivalent of European bards. They’re traditional pieces, using scales very different from Western music, that increasingly have to add a singer with a synthesizer or other Western instrument. The film documents music that has been passed on from generation to generation for centuries, and that gets played on traditional instruments such as the washent, masinko, krar and begena.
For two years, director Quino Piñero travelled across Ethiopia, ‘the land where even the coffee beans sing’, according to an inhabitant of the former province of Kaffa. Like all Ethiopians, he is as proud as can be of the country’s traditional music, which must never be lost.

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