Burnside Album Details

Southern Ethiopia is the cradle of mankind. It is the home of 55 distinct and diverse peoples who travel annually to Arba Minch, the centre of the Rift valley, to meet, celebrate and perform their traditional music and dance at the Festival of a Thousand Stars. Last year over 500 performers journeyed from desert, lake lands and mountaintops to bring their music and dance to a joyous 15,000 crowd. They sing and dance to celebrate life and death, birth and marriage, their precious animals and the richness of the land that they love, as they have done for millennia. Festival of a Thousand Stars is the soundscape from three incredible days of performance, the best of the 2005 Festival. Its infectious, spiritual and hypnotic sound will make you feel you have traveled to some of the deepest parts of Ethiopia. The festival was recorded onto 24 tracks by Martin Cradick and Su Hart of Baka Beyond and edited into an hour of evocative music.