🦻🏾 We welcome you to join us Wednesday, February 11 at Bleach Listening Room (@ble___ach) for the 9th instalment of Sensational Listening Session (SLS).
📻 This month on SLS we feature sonic visionnaire Sudan Archives ahead of her February 15 concert at The Pearl. Archives also known as Brittney Parks is a self taught avant-garde violinist, combining left-field strains of R&B, hip-hop, and experimental electronic music with hypnotic string loops and the fiddling style of West Africa and Sudan.
Artist Bio
After bursting onto the scene in 2017 with "Come Meh Way”, she released her debut album Athena in 2019, which drew inspiration from divine Black feminine power. With Athena, the cover makes it clear: the violin is at the centre of Sudan Archives' Afrofuturist universe. She is a violinist who never tires of pushing the boundaries of her instrument, a vocalist who shapes R&B as if it were clay, a rapper-not-rapper, an imaginative producer and a restless archaeologist of African American sound identity, among many other things.
Her second LP Natural Brown Prom Queen was her most personal project to date, taking in race, womanhood, and the fiercely loyal, loving relationships at the heart of her life with her family, friends, and partner. On her third and latest album to date, The BPM, the collective and the personal come together. Parks recorded it partly in Chicago and Detroit as a tribute to the two capitals of black dance music, but she did so accompanied by a group of close collaborators: her twin sister, her cousins, and several friends from her native Cincinnati.
Sudan Archives has toured extensively playing at festivals such as Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Coachella in California and has shared stages with artists’ such as Andre 3000 and Flying Lotus.
Session Details
💿 @jalade__will be joined by resident DJs: Losso (@losso_____works) and Kikino (@kristenliston), punctuating the session with a curated selection of tracks placing the Sudan Archives sound in a wider musical conversation. Halfway through the episode, we will go into the segment where we turn our focus solely on Sudan Archives discography before ending the night with an improvisational B3B.
💗 All levels of listeners are welcome.
About the gathering
Sensational Listening Sessions at Bleach are an opportunity to gather and collectively listen. The Bleach Listening Room is free to enter, offering a thoughtful selection of wines and small plates. Seating is first-come, first-served.
Listeners are encouraged to be present, listen intentionally (to the music and each other) and to bring something to draw.
