INTERVIEW:zena
Rooted in Ethiopian musical tradition and shaped by London’s ever‑evolving sound, ZENA are carving out a space that feels expansive yet deeply personal. The duo Yohan Kebede and Menelik, pull from the sounds that lived in their homes growing up, then stretch them out into something modern and made to move!
Their debut EP TEMESGEN is a project about gratitude, memory and forward motion — music that doesn’t rush but still hits. We caught up with ZENA to talk about letting improvisation lead, building trust as a duo, bringing Ethiopian musical language into new spaces, and what it means to make “home” a feeling you can hear.
Interview BY VICTORIA ENCONTRA
Q: Take me back to the moment ZENA started to feel real. What was happening around that time?
MENELIK: It was definitely around the time we did our first gig; we were mostly playing covers. There was such a good turnout to the concert that we were like ‘Oh Shit, okay’ people actually wanna hear music that we wanna make. From there, it gave us confidence. From the Get-go, we always enjoyed making music together and there was good synergy in terms of productive workflow. Sometimes when you try to make music with people you can spend hours and make nothing and other times ‘Oh shit, we accidently wrote our song’.
Q: ZENA takes influence from Ethiopian heritage but was formed in London. What are some of your earliest memories of Ethiopian music growing up?
YOHAN: My Mum used to run a restaurant in Finchley Road, in northwest London. Every Friday and Saturday in the Restaurant they would have live music. There’s a band called KRAR COLLECTIVE, and they used to play every Friday and Saturday, very traditional music, they would have dancers as well. And my whole family, my mum, my dad and my siblings were working at the restaurant. I was kind of roaming from 6-12 years old. I was super interested in the music and in between serving people my mum would tell me what type of Ethiopian music he’s doing right now (KRAR COLLECTIVE), or the way he’s dancing right now comes from this part of Ethiopia. So, when we started making music together that was my first reference.
MENELIK: my mum played some traditional music, but she used to listen to a lot more Ethiopian Punk or JAZZ so maybe less like KRAR COLLECTIVE music or less traditional. You can tell when my mum is getting homesick when she starts playing those tunes, but most of the time its slightly more modern, the stuff from the 70s and 80s, the sort of music she grew up listening to.
Q: Did you always have that connection to Ethiopian Music?
MENELIK: It felt normal to listen to (Ethiopian music), I never felt like I was listening to a separate Kind of music. And then as I got older, I realised not everyone has grown up with that kind of connection to be listening to whatever your parents are listening to. And for them to be proud of their music like that is a special thing.
Q: you’ve both mentioned artists like HAILU MERGIA, ALEMAYEHU ESHETE and MULATU ASTATKE. What was it about their music that made you want to create something of your own?
YOHAN: All those artists you just named, their music makes us want to create innovative music in the same way they did. They’re all different, but what they all have in common is that they took Ethiopian traditional music and interpreted it in their own way. So like with MULATU, for example, a lot of Latin American Tunes is in his music. He mixes often Ethiopian melodic scales with Latin rhythm. And then you got HAILU MERGIA who’s a accordion who will take Ethiopian traditional songs and arrange them with an organ. ALEMAYEHU ESTHETE, they call him the Elvis of Ethiopia. He’s very much into rock and roll. We want to do the same thing in the sense that for our generation we wanna take traditional Ethiopian music - and MENELIK loves HIP-HOP. I love HIP-HOP and R&B, so we wanna blend those things with it just like them (HAILU, ALEMAYEHU and MULATU) in their time.
Q: when you’re creating together in the studio, how does the process usually work between the two of you?
MENELIK: as musicians we home our craft when we are live, we just try to Jam on ideas. Sometimes it gets to that granular detail, we’ll sit there for hours talking about that stuff. I think in general; I’m a bit more chill and YOHAN is thoughtful and say’s it as it is by saying it might be a little (too much/too little).
Q: your debut EP TEMSEGEN translates to ‘thank god’ in Amharic. When you listen back to the record now, what moments stand out to you?
YOHAN: the title track, which is called ‘TEMESGEN’. There’s a traditional Ethiopian song form, which is called TUZITA, and the easiest way to explain it is our version of the Blues. No one really owns it; everyone just does their own version of it. Every Ethiopian album will have a TUZITA on it somewhere. Whether you play Sax, keyboard, you sing, you do TUZITA, so we thought it was only right to do ours. Especially when you grow up listening to TUZITA all the time, in a few times listening back to the record, when that hits, when the first Tuzita first comes in, it tugs on my heartstrings. Which is the best compliment I think we could give to ourselves. When we were making that song, I remember he (MENELIK) walked into the studio that one night, and I was there like pulling my hair out, and he was like, ‘what’s wrong?’. And I was like, ‘I can’t feel it, like I’m not feeling it’. And so I started calling random Ethiopian people that I know, and I was like, Look, I’m gonna put you on loudspeaker, just listen to this and tell me if you (feel it), we were playing it in the studio on the phone to people, and they were like, ‘no, no, I feel it’. And eventually I got there.
MENELIK: The Opening, the opening track. I feel like it was, sort of, maybe the, the thing we spent the least amount of time on, but every time I have to write answers to (Answers to Questions), I have to listen to the album to, to just like, force myself to do it, so, when that comes on now, it really does set the tone, and it really calms me down. I feel like that tune grew on me a lot. It’s the standout moment for me.
Q: ‘My Love Your Love’ began through improvisation. Do you remember the moment you realised the track had something special?
Menelik: I think I remember, I think I was rehearsing. And we were playing something traditional really really wrong, to the point where (of no going back). But we stopped, and then we listened back to the recording, and we were like, ‘Oh wait, this bass line is cool.’ Because that song, its been through so many (Trails), it’s like one of the first ones we wrote, and it took so long for us to finish it, it’s this base line, somehow, we turned this into a song. We were in the studio doing the actual recording, and he was like, ‘I don’t, I don’t like the melody. I want to change the Melody.’ I was like, ‘It’s too late now, man. I’ve got the bass line.’ And that’s all we’ve got, at least. And I feel like it’s just so catchy for some reason.
YOHAN: Because the bass line’s amazing, the drums are amazing. I felt like my part, the keyboard part, was lacking something. Like it could be better. The brain’s always like, I have a plan, but like, well, that’s me. But honestly, with this song, because its based on a traditional Ethiopian rhythm called Eskista, which is the, if anyone’s seen Ethiopian dancing, it’s lot of shoulders and stuff. And I’m, especially when we go out to, like, clubs and stuff, like Ethiopian clubs or parties, and I love to dance to Ethiopian music. In that restaurant beneath, there was, like, a function hall, and I had to go to lessons when I was a kid, dancing lessons. When we do a song like that, I need to feel that, when I’m sitting down, I’m like, ‘yeah, you gotta get up, you gotta move.’ And so, when we listened back after we recorded it, and I was like, ‘Oh My God, I feel that so much. I was like, I’m so happy. So basically, the songs, they gotta make you feel.
Q:With TEMSGEN arriving on digital and vinyl via Brownswood, how do you imagine people experiencing this record?
YOHAN: When people listen to TEMSGEN, I would like them to experience Ethiopian music in a way maybe that they haven’t experienced it before. Theres a, the general view, I think, nowadays with Ethiopian music is that it’s very chill. And its just for life. Like, you know, sitting down listening to it, which is fine. There’s nothing against that view but I don’t think that should be the comprehensive view of Ethiopian Music. I think Ethiopian music in general leans more towards getting up and dancing and, you know, songs that are 15 minutes long with the same loop and just people dancing over and over again. A lot of alcohol and like really fun and sexy and all that stuff. I think that’s what we want people to feel when they hear it. I think its for us to be like, this is our experience of Ethiopian music. We want you to experience that too.
Q: is there a type of venue or setting you feel ZENA would love to try/play in?
MENELEK: I don’t know, I mean I just want to take the music everywhere. There’s a lot of good venues.
YOHAN: you know what would be fun, there’s a venue in Brixton called Hootananny Brixton. We’d definitely go and hit (that one). That’s one of my favourite places. Next week, for our record launch were playing at this venue in Dalston. It’s really small and really tight but its run by the most hilarious Ethiopian Guys. My friends threw me a birthday party here last week and the guys who run the venue were drunk and so playing there would be great but you know what, ultimately I think we want to play in places outside the realm of like cultural music so again I don’t see why we couldn’t play this music at Coachella. Coachella or I don’t know, at like Soul Action. I think anything’s possible in my head.
Q: What’s the weirdest sound you’ve ever tried to build?
MENELIK: we both know there’s a little bit in ‘Anchi Bale Gamé’. Its us on a voicemail just screaming but he’s going like ‘Wooo’, but it’s buried in there somewhere.
YOHAN: in our first ever release which is a cover of a song ‘Anchi Bale Gamé’. Theres a sound you’ll hear it, it’s like ‘Woo Woo’ and that’s me and him doing that into a voice note and then we sent it to the laptop and just like dropped it in.
I think we’re both into quite weird and quirky sounds in general.
Q: Finish the Sentence: people think ZENA is about ______, but really it’s about _____.
YOHAN: People think ZENA is about an Ethio Jazz revival, but really ZENA is about showing the sides of Ethiopian music that they’re not familiar with from the perspective of young Londoners
QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS:
Q: One Ethiopian artist everyone should listen to?
YOHAN: 1 Ethiopian artist I think everyone should know about is called Manalemosh Dibo. She is like the greatest singer I’ve ever heard in my life. She’s my favourite Ethiopian artist. I listen to her every single day. And no one knows her name. well, no one outside of Ethiopia knows her name, but she’s amazing.
MENELIK: Alemayehu Eshete. He’s one of my favourite by far.
Q: A song that reminds you of home?
YOHAN: I’m going to say a song called Gonder by Manalemosh Dibo.
MENELIK: might have to be, like, it might just have to be a Tizita, like Nati Haile
Q: Studio session essentials?
YOHAN: Coffee. Yeah, coffee, definitely! Incense. Yeah. Coffee, Incense.
MENELIK: you hate lights, so just, like… Darkness.
Q: one artist that you would love to collaborate with? Current and Past
YOHAN: Current, I’m going to say a guy called NOURISHED BY TIME’. He’s amazing. I think he made an album last year called THE PASSIONATE ONES, my favourite album of the year. Past, I’m going to say ROD TEMPERTON. Written Michael Jackson’s, like, great hits.
MENELIK: current Artists. I don’t really listen to any music that’s current. (PAST) I would want to be there in those, like, parliament funkadelic sessions in the 70s. George Clinton (era).
Q: what are you guys listening to now that’s seeping into your work?
YOHAN: ASAP ROCKY and I love it (DON’T BE DUMB ALBUM) and I guess people might think how does that relate to what you’re doing I guess part of what we’re doing is, you know, mixing Ethiopian music with everything we listen to now. When I listen to our album, that could easily be the intro on like a hip-hop album. So, when I listen to ASAP Rocky records and shit like that, the production is always like amazing and so I always think how can we get some of that into what we’re doing.
MENELIK: I’ve been rinsing Slick RICK. I can’t lie, ‘The Ruler’ it’s too good, let’s get some of that in.