Ben Bekele’s ‘Zawsze coś’ Builds a Personal Mythology from Family Archives

The collective known as Ben Bekele is not a single musician, and its name is not a Western surname. Hubert Zemler, Kamil Piotrowicz and Igor Wiśniewski adopted the Amharic personal name—meaning “he has grown”—years ago, using it as a container for conceptual misdirection. On their new album Zawsze coś, that quiet play with identity continues, but the stakes deepen.

Zemler has long drawn from family history. The cover of Zawsze coś features a blurred photograph taken by his father during a mid-1980s trip to Ethiopia. It is part of a personal archive that already surfaced on the trio’s 2019 compilation track. Where that earlier work introduced the fictional Ben Bekele, this album turns inward. It is not about Ethiopia, but about the way fragments—a boy teaching a song, two small drums, a handful of stories—harden into private mythology over four decades.

The record resists turning biography into narrative. Rhythm is structural, from the ritualistic hint of “La Clave en medio de la nada” to the precise architecture of “R-4.” Later, “Phillip Jeffries” (named for the Lynch character suspended between dream and reality) and the ambiguous “Linoleum (Shining)” pull the album into a space where memory, fantasy and invention overlap. Nothing is stabilized, and the music never asks for a clear distinction between what was lived and what was imagined.