The artists:

Gabriel Teodros (http://www.gabrielteodros.com)

As a curly-haired mixed kid raised in Seattle's South End and Central District, Teodros carved his identity with and between Black music and old-school activists, Mexican and Southeast Asian gangs, First Nations community, a group of Filipino poets, a Chinese landlord and an Ethiopian family he met one by one at the airport as they first emigrated to the United States. This is the 98118, as reported in the 2010 census, the most ethnically diverse zip code in the country. Teodros calls it "a berbere, tapatio and wasabi mix... we're making injera, and there's some kim-chee in the fridge."

His most recent album Colored People's Time Machine is a major musical undertaking and is remarkably cohesive considering it involved over 20 musicians as aesthetically diverse as the 98118. Featured guests include Meklit Hadero, Bocafloja, Sabreena Da Witch and SKIM, along with Teodros' long-time musical partners, Khingz and Amos Miller. Producers include BeanOne, Budo, JustD'amato (of The Physics), EarDr.Umz the MetroGnome and WD4D. Languages include English, Arabic, Spanish, Tagalog and a little Amharic... it's something like a bus ride through the South End, complete with valleys and hills.

Meklit Hadero (http://www.meklithadero.com)

Born in Ethiopia, raised in the U.S. and nurtured by San Francisco’s richly diverse arts scene, this acclaimed singer embodies worlds. Joining her soul-filled phrasing to a songwriter’s craft, her music’s influences range wide – from the jazz and soul favorites she grew up on; to the hip-hop and art-rock she loves; to folk traditions from the Americas and her forebears’ East African home. But this singular artist’s sound, drawn of multitudes, is hers alone.

Emerging from her adopted hometown of San Francisco, Meklit erupted to national notice with the 2010 release of “On a Day Like this…” on Porto Franco Records. Hailed by Filter magazine for “[combining] New York jazz with West Coast folk and African flourishes, all bound together by Hadero’s beguiling voice,” her full-length debut — which also garnered feature-stories on its maker from NPR, PBS and National Geographic — brought Meklit’s music to a whole new audience. It also announced the arrival, as the San Francisco Chronicle has put it, of “an artistic giant in the early stages.”

Burntface a.k.a. Ellias Fullmore (http://www.appsynthmedia.com)

The name Burntface comes from the English translation of the ancient Greek word Ethiopia, which literally means “land of burnt face people”. In Greek mythology there is an episode where Phaethon, the illegitimate child of sun god Helios asked to borrow his father’s sun chariot and crashed it into Africa burning everyone’s faces in the process.

Burntface started his formidable DIY career by saving up his paper route money to buy a Roland MS-1 sampler and a four-track recorder at age 14. By 16 he released his first self-financed album “The Resume” featuring local rappers from South Bend including Jae Ellis (who went on to collaborate with Ludachris and 4eyes). Over 15 years later with degrees in Business Administration and Applied Media Theory, Burntface still espouses the DIY ideals, taking care of majority of production, design and marketing of his projects. Using the knowhow from his production work for the Academy Awards Red Carpet, MTV and NBC he helped organize shows and festivals including the First Annual Little Ethiopia festival in Los Angeles and later co-produced the Ethiopian-African Millenium Celebration on the grounds of the Washington Monument in Washington, DC that was attended by over 20,000 people. For that work Fullmore and his business partners received a Congressional Award on the Capitol Hill.