Tag: Hailu Mergia

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It's an old saw by this point to suggest that while the livelihood of the average working musician has never been more perilous, the curious listener has at the same time never before had access to such an abundance of quality music, from nagging earworms to the experimental margins and everything in between. In a year that saw bubbling...

Four years in the making, for her first full-length on New Amsterdam Records the composer and vocalist Mingjia Chen presents a collection of through-composed songs which still carry the discursiveness and formal spontaneity of recitative or more melismatic arioso, as half-scrawled thoughts and ribbons of reflections stack together in a manner at once reminiscent of the opera or Broadway,...