So i had plans to be in Ethiopia right now with The Arba Minch Collective, but sometimes life makes other plans for you... and instead i ended up somewhere between Brooklyn, NY and New Addis (Washington, D.C.) for the last 2 months. While here on the East Coast, i've been able to start and complete a collaborative project with Amos Miller entitled Air 2 A Bird, fine-tune and record more tracks for the Colored People's Time Machine album and found time to do a little mixtape! If you haven't heard, Oh No dropped an instrumental project recently called Ethiopium, a really dope collection of beats made using classic and rare Ethiopian samples. On one hand, i was really excited to see a producer who i'm a fan of using samples from my mother's land... on the other hand, it's crazy as a musician, to know the struggles of other Ethiopian musicians, and how much harder it must be back home to create this music, that in 2009 people are sampling our classics left and right, and i know that very little, if any, of the money made off these samples ever actually gets back to these musicians, who can barely make a living off this music, and who back home couldn't make a living off of it at all. Not to say i'm against sampling, most of the hip hop i love is still based on samples... but if someones gonna do it, i feel like there should at least be an Ethiopian perspective to go with these beats! So when nobody was looking, i made a mixtape... GT's Ethiopium! I call it A Jitter Generation Mixtape cause none of the songs are longer then 2 minutes... download it, love it, pass it on!

-- gabriel teodros