After more than two decades immersed in Ethiopian music — including eleven years living in Addis Ababa — New York based violinist, composer, and bandleader Kaethe Hostetter, aka K8A, steps forward with her debut solo album: Woradj Alle (Impressions of Ethiopia).

Built from live-looped violin and electronics, the album unfolds as a ritual performance: hypnotic, textural, and immersive—Ethiopian melodic systems refract through dub minimalism, psych abstraction, and avant improvisation. Not fusion, but more transmission— music that blurs memory, place, and time.

Each composition functions as a vignette: portraits of people, fleeting encounters, and atmospheres from the years she called Ethiopia home. The album title, Woradj Alle — a colloquial Amharic phrase meaning “let me off around here” — evokes the public minibus taxis of Addis Ababa, where journeys unfold in fragments. K8A invites listeners to step off into these sonic environments, where memory, place, and time dissolve into layered violin architecture.

Kaethe Hostetter five string violin & electronics

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.

Classically trained and forged in the experimental scenes of Boston and New York, K8A is a founding member of both Debo Band and QWANQWA. Her work has long lived at the intersection of Ethiopian traditional forms and contemporary improvisation. With Woradj Alle, she places herself fully inside that continuum — not as observer, but as composer, informed in her authorship with deep ethnographic studies, now contributing to the canon with her most personal statement to date. This body of work pays homage and summons the spirits of both influential and lesser known Ethiopian artists contemporary and ancient.

Her collaborators have included Fred Frith, Tomeka Reid, Butch Morris, Thalia Zedek, and Teddy Afro. QWANQWA’s most recent album was praised by Songlines as “absolutely irresistible.” As a Jerome Foundation awarded artist at Roulette for 2026, K8A will debut the album in a multimedia performance at the Brooklyn venue on April 28, 2026.