When Berhana, the 27-year-old singer born Amain Berhane, finished his film program at the New School, he did what a lot of young artistic people in New York City do: He started working at a restaurant. During his time as a chef and assistant manager at Robataya, a now-defunct Japanese spot in the East Village, the recent graduate undertook a new, informal curriculum in Japanese culture; he was even tasked with learning to speak the language.
For the Atlanta native born to Ethiopian parents, the transition was difficult at first, but Berhana’s tight-knit group of co-workers helped shape the trajectory of his career. “I’m seeing them, like, all week,” Berhana said of his former colleagues when we spoke recently at Hi-Collar, another East Village outpost, owned by Robataya’s former managers. “And they’re putting me on to different books to read, different movies to watch, different music to listen to. That’s kinda how I was exposed to [Japanese] culture.”
Berhana’s kaleidoscopic debut album, HAN, deftly incorporates these different artistic influences. Released Friday, the record builds on the warm and woozy soundscape that defined his breakout single, “Janet,” and his 2016 self-titled EP. Berhana recorded both while working at Robataya, and the restaurant shows up in HAN, too. “The recording you hear at the end of ‘Golden,’” he explained, referencing the album’s first, stellar full-length track, “that’s a small sliver of the chant that they made us do every day when we walked in. I recorded it when I was working.” The audio blends organically into the track not just because of the production surrounding it, but also because of Berhana’s deep attachment to the chapter of his life that it represents.
At times, listening to HAN feels like witnessing a metacultural exchange. The album is a project of meticulous curation and a map of the artist’s geographic ties; it’s also a direct challenge to what some audiences might expect of a young black musician raised in Atlanta. Referencing the sometimes troubling impulse of American artists to cherry-pick or fetishize cultural products from Asian countries, he continued: “I did want to bring a level of respect to what I was doing and not have it just be like, Oh yeah, I’m into anime.” As he worked on HAN, a simple guiding question emerged: “How can I be as honest as possible?”
The result is a record that manages to be eclectic yet cohesive. One way Berhana achieves this effect is by strategically pulling in musical references that are themselves references to previous works. For example, among the key inspirations for the album’s soul- and funk-inflected songs—including tracks such as “Golden”—was Neuromantic, a 1981 album by the Japanese artist Yukihiro Takahashi. Going a step further, the Japanese soul and funk musicians of Takahashi’s era were, for their part, drawing from the ideas and cultural cachet of black artists in America.
Much of HAN was recorded in Japan, between Kumejima, a small island in Okinawa, and Tokyo. In a nod to his international journey, Berhana threads together the album with short interludes that take the form of in-flight announcements. The singer wrote these segues to serve as narrative guides for the listener and to collate the album’s disparate genres. How can I make all of these different sounds feel in the same world? he asked himself. HAN bounces through funk, soul, jazz, rock, and pop elements with little regard for the distinctions between those categories. Berhana resists placing himself within one genre, all too aware that singers like him are often relegated to the rap and R&B genres—or, worse yet, that nebulous arena of “urban contemporary.”
“Everybody’s called my music either rap or R&B, and I get it,” he said. “I’m a black guy making music, so that’s just what you wanna say, and I’ve seen it happen to artists forever.” He mentioned Prince, who was often described as an R&B artist rather than, say, a rock star. But young black musicians today are stretching the boundaries of their assigned labels, and Berhana is hoping to do the same. Noting that he’s always been drawn to experimental artists such as David Bowie, Björk, André 3000, and Squarepusher, he explained: “I wanna make music that people like; I just don’t wanna make music people expect.”
| A1 | HAN |
| A2 | Golden |
| A3 | Drnuk |
| A4 | I Been |
| A5 | Lucky Strike |
| B6 | Health Food |
| B7 | G2g |
| B8 | California |
| B9 | Flashback |
| B10 | I Wasn't Told |
