Fetsum

about

Of the many words that one might choose to define FETSUM’s long awaited debut, perhaps the most accurate is ‘global’. It’s an adjective that not only summarises the sound that he has fashioned since he first started writing in his early teens, but also his background. FETSUM’s parents were Eritrean revolutionists during the country’s thirty year War Of Independence, and he was born in Egypt after his 16 year old mother became a casualty of the fighting in her homeland when she was four months pregnant. Within 18 months they had moved to Italy, where he lived for the next two to three years, before heading on to Stuttgart, Germany, where his aunt had also been forced to flee while seeking asylum from the war. Initially they only planned to help her settle before returning to Italy, but they ended up staying, and it was during these formative years that FETSUM’s musical interests began to develop. THE COLORS OF HOPE is consequently an extraordinarily assured, immediately accessible collection that calls upon a whole host of influences gathered throughout his idiosyncratic life, from soul to reggae to the Mande Music of Mali, from folk to rock to hip hop, and – inevitably, especially when one knows his story – far beyond. “I think I always had a very natural feeling towards music,” he explains in Berlin, the city where he now lives with his partner and young son. “It’s intuitive. I always had music around me, because the people that raised me did. So I had the whole spectrum of