The album kicks off with “This Was Made Here,” a percussively poetic exploration of displacement and longing for home that builds to a lithe solo by Tassew Wondem on the Ethiopian reed flute, or washint. While Ethiopian cadences wend through the entire album, the influences move to the foreground on the traditional Amharic poetry of Yerakeh Yeresal” and the quietly mesmerizing “Yesterday is a Tizita.” Suffused with a sense of delicious ache best described by the Portuguese term “saudade,” the song flows from Meklit’s cascading lines on krar to Tassew Wondem’s ethereal washint to Randal Fisher’s red-clay tenor.