House is a waypoint, not an endpoint, on ‘Pure Brown Promenade Queen’
Born Brittney Parks and nicknamed Sudan as a toddler, the artist is pushed by her intense curiosity.
Edwig Henson
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Edwig Henson
Born Brittney Parks and nicknamed Sudan as a toddler, the artist is pushed by her intense curiosity.
Edwig Henson
Sudan Archives’ music celebrates digging. With infectious curiosity, her oddball collages of hip-hop, digital and globally sourced folks bridge worlds and tramp by means of them, encouraging you to forge your personal routes as effectively. Throughout two EPs and an album, the self-taught violinist, producer, and songwriter has honed a definite mix of layered vocals and instrumentation that each pleases the ear and challenges it to parse all of the fusion. Her vibrant second album, Pure Brown Promenade Queen, particulars her passages between her hometown of Cincinnati, her adopted metropolis of Los Angeles and the various different locales, folks, and traditions that inform her idiosyncratic type. The report appears like a world tour of her mind, explicit but capacious — and at all times lively.
Cosmopolitan music typically leans closely into the push and the signifiers of jetsetting — accents, passports, landmarks, cuisines, runways — however Pure Brown Promenade Queen‘s preoccupation is terroir, the distinct situations that make a spot distinctive. Sudan Archives would not simply expertise or eat world sounds; she interacts with them, her fingers sifting by means of the soil as she feels out each little component. “Suck out the honey,” she implores on the steamy R&B monitor “Milk Me,” capturing the intimacy and pleasure of her sourcing. Every encounter appears to make clear her personal origins and path ahead.
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The album builds on the conviction of her debut, Athena, which bolstered her signature sound with heftier singing and breezy rapping. The quilt of that globetrotting report, which pictured Sudan Archives and her violin as a Greek statue, captures the whimsy, audacity and confidence of her musical imaginative and prescient. Born Brittney Parks and nicknamed Sudan as a toddler, the artist is a Black Midwesterner with no direct ties to Sudan, South Sudan, or Greece. She picked up the violin when an opportunity efficiency by Canadian fiddlers at her Ohio elementary faculty sparked an obsession. She discovered to play by ear in varied ensembles — one thing she references on the Pure Brown Promenade Queen interlude “Do Your Factor (Refreshing Springs)” — and later got interested within the precise sounds of Sudan, which coincidentally has a tradition of ceremonial and experimental violin music. She adopted her stage title after this tacit connection implored her to peruse the broader archive of African folks music. Extra hyperlinks adopted — a lot of them hyperlinks on YouTube — as she explored and embraced the string traditions of Estonia, Ghana, and Russia. All this cultural gallivanting guidelines out any notion of “authenticity,” a fraught time period that, within the title of correctly attributing sounds and types to their sources, typically conflates origination with originality and inspiration with extraction.
Pure Brown Promenade Queen has little curiosity in proving Parks’ legitimacy and is extra pushed by her intense curiosity. The acts of borrowing and interpolating are brazenly embedded within the music. On the nearer, “513,” she warps the hook of LL Cool J’s “Going Again to Cali” right into a homegoing reprise. Opener “Dwelling Maker” is an ode to non-public house that begins with a quicksilver suite that glints between snatches of synth, trumpet, keys, harp, and a breakbeat earlier than settling right into a pulsing R&B association. “I am a homemaker,” Sudan Archives sings on the hook, celebrating her domicile and the various components that comprise it. Her house is a waypoint somewhat than an enclosure, the house and its builder altering as folks and concepts drift by means of.
That enthusiasm for each affect and confluence flavors the swaggering and saucy album, which finds the singer mulling relationships, her physique and her needs over compositions that shimmer with textures and overtones. The songs, which frequently have a number of producers, virtually glow with life, always altering path and form. “Ciara” wryly makes use of sun-soaked melodies to toast to a roughneck relative (“I obtained a cousin in Chicago / Who will smack you in your face”) then empties right into a sludgy bridge that shifts but once more right into a gale of chill funk. The dewy vocals and manufacturing on gradual jam “ChevyS10” liquefy, sublimate and freeze like water altering states. Noise rap and hyperpop typically use volatility to disorient and dissociate, however as Sudan jaunts from Miami bass on “Freakalizer” to Irish jigs on “TDLY (Homegrown Land)” she sounds extra grounded and clear-headed.
“Egocentric Soul” melds choral harmonies, violin riffs and pounding drums right into a folksy rap monitor, the busyness of the beat matching Sudan’s fraught tales of styling her hair. The theme remembers different issues of Black hair by ladies in soul music — India.Arie’s “I Am Not My Hair” and Solange’s “Do not Contact My Hair” — however Sudan’s tackle the topic emphasizes working for self-acceptance somewhat than deflecting exterior gazes, subtly underscoring that particular person autonomy is on the root of such songs whilst they point out experiences relatable to any Black lady. “Copycat” approaches the topic otherwise, Sudan playfully addressing biters. Calling out plagiarists is customary rap stuff, however the tune doubles as a metacommentary on the unappreciated omni-influence of Black ladies, Sudan asking how she will be each despised and Xeroxed. It is a worthwhile query. In a world with a lot erasure of Black ladies’s contributions, what can authenticity even appear like for them?
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Management comes up typically on Pure Brown Promenade Queen. On the title monitor, she alludes to her time in N2, a defunct teen-pop duo together with her twin sister. She’s stated that rebelling in opposition to the path of the group, which was put collectively by her late stepdad, resulted in her getting kicked out the home. Due to this historical past, the polyvalent music she makes as Sudan Archives is usually learn as antipop. However right here she makes it clear that she rejected her lack of authority somewhat than the music she made. “I simply wish to have my t*****s out / T*****s out / T*****s out,” she chants within the outro, once more linking inventive and bodily autonomy. Her music is much less a rejection of pop and extra an embrace of her uninhibited self. (Plus, her pop instincts are on full show within the composition of those and previous songs. She may be very able to writing earworms and being an ethnomusicological nerd on the identical rattling time.)
When she’s not explicitly speaking about authority, she’s exuding it in her cocksure rapping and singing, which anchors all of the album’s movement. She gushes with concepts and approaches to those bustling preparations, hopscotching throughout drum patterns (“Yellow Brick Street”), bouncing off of basslines (“Copycat”) and gliding over melodies (“Homesick”). Her violin seems on over half the songs, nevertheless it’s much less of a focal instrument, underscoring the rising sense that she is the lead. Her widening net of influences and collaborators (most notably multi-instrumentalist Ben Dickey, who’s credited on almost each tune) affirms that she is the conductor by means of which all these currents circulation.
It is becoming, then, that her journeys lead her again to Cincinnati on “#513.” “Hollywood will make you hole / I am too rooted in my methods,” she sings defiantly, setting the tune up as a prodigal return. However the tinny tune is just not an ode to the rustbelt metropolis or a homecoming within the typical sense of the phrase. Sudan Archives would not head house to settle outdated scores, reminisce on higher days, or restore herself. She goes just because, in that second, that is the place she needs to be. That caprice captures the itinerant spirit of her music and the album’s arch sense of house. On the earth of Sudan Archives, house is anyplace, anybody, and any sound that pushes you ahead.
