Development of instruments and sound world for new album Bahir Zaf

Application summary

Bahir Zaf is a new sound world I’m creating through the development of electro-acoustic instruments that serve as sonic sculptures, ecological interfaces, and mnemonic devices. The title – Amharic for “eucalyptus,” or “tree from across the ocean” – offers a potent metaphor for migration, naturalized foreignness, and hybrid identities. At its core is the story of a woman who shapeshifts between human and hyena, drawing from East African mythology to examine the fear of the other, porous boundaries of identity, and weaponization of racialized and femme bodies through a mytho-poetic narrative. Grounded in African cosmologies, sonic traditions, and folklore methodology, Bahir Zaf investigates music as a living archive, and oral traditions as technologies that carry political, historical, and social knowledge across generations and geographies. Here I’ll be creating instruments by observing how sonic tools are shaped by lived environments, how they travel, are modified, and translated throughout the continent, further reflecting on our intercultural relations, and migrant / diasporic connections. Bahir Zaf is contextualised in Finland by challenging "natural / native" definitions, and engaging with topics of xenophobia and ethnonationalism, particularly with rising far-right ideologies in Finland and Europe. The project also critiques extractive capitalist systems by subverting industrial, Western sound practices and hierarchies; rather centering animist, relational, and memory-based logics. Bahir Zaf will be realized through research, instrument-making as compositional tools, and collaboration. The work will culminate as my third album – composed with the instruments created during this process, featuring original compositions, field recordings, and improvisations. Bahir Zaf invites listeners into a sonically and politically charged landscape where sound becomes a tool for reimagining belonging, challenging borders, and confronting our own ghosts.