How RIMON found her rhythm in Amsterdam

The Eritrean-born, Netherlands-raised artist spent years on the move before returning home and readying her best project to date.

Crack Magazine has teamed up with VanMoof for I Know A Place – a four-part series exploring four European cities through the eyes of the people that inhabit them. We’re speaking to musicians and tastemakers to find out what about their city makes them feel free, and energises them to create.

It’s a little after midday on a winter-sunlit October day in Amsterdam’s Frederik Hendrikbuurt neighbourhood in the West of the city. 

RIMON – the multidisciplinary artist who’s been credited with heralding a new age in adventurous, globally-informed R&B – has requested we meet at her favourite coffee spot. It’s an Ethiopian store whose owner recognises her on arrival. She orders then sits on a bench out front, soaking up the sun.  

A turning point in RIMON’s creative journey came when she was 17 years old and dropped out of school to visit Ethiopia where her father is from. Processing her own personal geography and history, she found the impulse to be a musician.

Since then, themes of identity and home have threaded through her work, wherever it’s taken her artistically. She’s crisscrossed Europe for fashion weeks, spent a period of time in London expanding her creative community, travelled the globe for shoots and studio sessions, and one day dreams of launching a music programme in Ethiopia to give back to her homeland.

For now, though, she’s landed back in Amsterdam – the city she grew up in and the place she calls home. Exploring the streets on a VanMoof bike and drifting between delis, community gardens and RIMON’s lockdown apartment (“A lot of wine!”), the atmosphere is specific to the city – art deco brickwork echoing the artist’s stylish and precise sound.    

“I adore the pace here,” she tells us from home a couple days after our shoot. “Passing streets I used to [walk] as a child. It’s nostalgic.” With a network of visual artists and musicians around her, Amsterdam unlocks RIMON’s fullest imagination – the comfort of home with the creative stimulus of the city. This year sounds characteristically busy, the most pressing matter being a debut album, Children of the Night – a project that represents years of exploring and collaborating, but also finding a path home.