MUSIC
Sudan Archives P H OTO : A L E X B L AC K
Sudan Archives’ ‘Athena’ Melds Future and Past After her appearance at Homecoming — and the rest of her tour — was canceled because of COVID19, the native Cincinnatian has some unexpected downtime to experiment with new music BY JAS O N GA R GA N O
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incinnati native and current Los Angeleno Brittney Denise Parks records music under the moniker Sudan Archives. The cover art for the vinyl version of her full-length debut, 2019’s Athena, finds Parks posing nude on a pedestal, bronzed like an old-school Greek statue in a nod to the album’s goddess namesake. Parks is holding a violin in her left hand, the backdrop engulfed in a plaintive shade of gray. The back cover is the same image from the reverse side. It’s a striking visual scheme and an apt introduction to an artist with rare aesthetic savvy and presence to spare. Parks, who grew up on the northeast side of Cincinnati, rechristened herself Sudan Archives — a reference to
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her still-evolving interest in melding contemporary musical techniques with African musical traditions — after moving to Los Angeles at age 19. Following a period of artistic and personal gestation, she signed to esteemed indie label Stones Throw Records and dropped a pair of wellreceived EPs (2017’s Sudan Archives and 2018’s Sink), both of which burrow in one’s consciousness via Parks’ atmospheric vocals, expressive violin and eclectic beats inspired equally by slanted R&B and experimental EDM. Then there’s the aforementioned visual acumen. The video for “Time,” a brief Folk-informed tone poem from the first EP, features Parks clad in colorful African garb as she traverses a timelessly
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barren desert setting. Conversely, “Nont For Sale,” a playful empowerment ditty from the second EP, is set in modern-day urban L.A. and features an impressively afroed Parks as she informs a self-involved acquaintance at the song’s opening, “I need to be free / Time to spread my wings” — sentiments that have long been at the forefront of Parks’ mind. “I think moving to Los Angeles was a goal of mine all along,” Parks says in a recent phone interview. “I just never really thought of staying in Cincinnati. I was always thinking that there is something more. I guess I just wanted to live in a city city, like a bigger city maybe. Now I’m just starting to realize I was kind of like a weirdo and I’m never really going to fit in anywhere. It didn’t really matter where I live.” Parks was immersed in music from an early age. She played violin in church as often as three times a week as a child. Her stepdad was involved in the music business through LaFace Records; he helped guide one of her first forays in “professional” music: a teenage Pop project with her twin sister that Parks eventually found creatively unsatisfying. Her mother’s and her big sister’s music had a lasting impact as well. “I was listening to a lot of Erykah Badu and Sade and Jazz, because that was what my mom was listening to,” she says. “And then I was listening to what my big sister was listening to, which was sexy black boy bands like B2K. She
loved Usher. She liked girl bands, too, like Destiny’s Child, so I was listening to stuff like that.” The mixing of genres is readily apparent in what she does as Sudan Archives. If the EPs were a nice appetizer, Athena is a full buffet. Executive produced by Parks (with help from some savvy engineers), the album’s 14 songs range from the jaunty “Glorious,” which sounds like Sade by way of M.I.A., to slow-burning album-closer “Pelicans in Summer,” which wouldn’t be out of place on a classic ’90s Trip Hop record. Athena’s production is simultaneously stripped back and richly layered. It moves from Avant Pop to classical African and Middle Eastern elements to saucy R&B with surprising dexterity, no doubt inspired by Parks’ various overseas travels in recent years and a decade of self-described “YouTube research.” She took violin lessons, but the rest is the result of an endlessly curious, autodidactic mind. The album credits “violin and violin arrangements, bass, mandolin, synth, drum programming, percussion & vocals by Sudan Archives.” “Nothing has ever really made sense for me,” Parks says when asked about her various influences, musically or otherwise. “I’m really philosophical and questioning of societal things. I remember being really young and being really curious. I was about battling the normal. I was over high school and its CONTINUES ON PAGE 20
