"Nefasphere" - A Conversation Across Oceans

Fifteen years after their first meeting in a New Jersey classroom, pioneering composer and Mutantrumpet inventor Ben Neill and Ethiopian electronic innovator Mikael Seifu have finally turned a long running conversation into sound.

Their new collaboration "Nefasphere" isn’t just a pair of tracks. It’s a living exchange between mentor and student, continents and cultures, breath and circuitry.

Across its two versions - the meditative Worldwinds Mix and the prismatic Moire Mix - the release is almost like a weather system moving between Addis Ababa and New York, carrying memory, mentorship and possibility on its currents.

There’s a backstory here, but you can hear it without reading the liner notes. Neill, the maverick Mutantrumpet inventor who has spent decades fusing brass timbres with electronics, taught Seifu at Ramapo College long before the latter became one of the leading lights of Ethiopiyawi Electronic.

The title, borrowed from the Amharic nefas — wind, breath, spirit — isn’t decorative. This is it's organising principle. In the Worldwinds Mix you hear Neill’s instrument sigh and coil back on itself, sampled and fed into layered drones that feel like air currents.

Seifu places his rhythms so they sway rather than march, polyrhythms glinting and fading like sunlight through moving leaves.

The Moire Mix shifts the focus without losing that pulse. Seifu introduces flickers of glitch and splintered percussion that make the surface ripple; Neill’s tones flare a little brighter, then retreat.

It’s the same material viewed from another angle, interference patterns opening up new spaces rather than filling old ones. Where the first mix feels like inhalation, this one is exhale - a release of tension into colour and movement.

What’s striking is how alive it all feels. Neill isn’t just overdubbing trumpet lines onto Seifu’s beats; the Mutantrumpet is a generator with its acoustic sound feeding the textures that surround it.

Seifu isn’t just bolting Ethiopian modes onto an ambient track. He treats rhythm as breath expanding and contracting in response. Instead of smoothing difference into something generic, the duo carve out a shared weather system.

In an age of scroll by singles, Nefasphere invites you to linger. Its details bloom slowly, revealing small shifts in tone and pattern that reward repeat listens. It’s also quietly emotional. Like a document of mentorship becoming collaboration, of ideas passed back and forth across time and distance until they cohere into a common language.

Neill has been exploring pattern, memory and technology for decades; Seifu has been absent since 2016’s Zelalem. Here they meet in the middle, and the result is a sound world at once ancient and futuristic, intimate and planetary. A true sphere of breath.

More About Ben Neill

Composer/performer Ben Neill is the inventor of the Mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, and is recognized as a musical innovator who “uses a schizophrenic trumpet to create art music for the people” (Wired Magazine). Using interactive computer technologies, Neill generates unique musical and visual experiences that blur the lines between acoustic and electronic music, minimalism, and visual media. Neill has recorded thirteen albums on labels including Universal/Verve, Thirsty Ear, Astralwerks, Six Degrees, and his own Blue Math label distributed by AWAL/Sony. His first book, Diffusing Music, was released on Bloomsbury Press in 2024.

More About Mikael Seifu

Mikael Seifu is an Ethiopian electronic music producer committed to “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” – a coinage Seifu uses to describe the music he and his peers are producing in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis-Ababa.

Born and raised in Addis Ababa, he moved to the US and went on to study music production & the music industry at Ramapo College of New Jersey, a small school about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan. Here Seifu met a mentor in Ben Neill, the composer and music technologist who trained with La Monte Young. Seifu was inspired by Neill to take serious his calling in music. Mikael’s music does not westernize or electronicize extant Ethiopian music. Instead, Seifu uses Ethio-Jazz’s spirit of brewing estranged styles for his own musical tincturing. Seifu’s passion above all else is to create something befitting of its time, yet “eternally Ethiopian.”

Find out more at www.benneill.com