Sudan Archives’ ‘Athena’ Melds Future and Past

After her appearance at Homecoming — and the rest of her tour — was canceled because of COVID- 19, the native Cincinnatian has some unexpected downtime to experiment with new music

BY JASON GARGANO

Cincinnati 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 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 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 cliques right away. I was not trying to be a regular girl. I was trying to grow up fast.”

Sudan Archives

PHOTO: ALEX BLACK

Parks was part of a small underground EDM scene in Cincinnati (she says her first paid gig was at Skylab Gallery in Columbus) but she never really found what she was looking for. Restless, she moved to Los Angeles to study music production at a community college.

“I realized I wanted to pursue music in some type of way,” Parks says. “I didn’t know what. Maybe I thought I would pursue music technology and be behind the scenes. And then I thought maybe I should be a session player. A lot of violinists are cover artists on YouTube and do cool stuff like that. But that wasn’t really working out because I wasn’t the type of girl who could just do a cover. I always did a flip, like totally remade the song and everybody was like, ‘What song is this?’ ”

Sudan Archives’ early home recordings eventually drew the attention of Stones Throw Records founder Peanut Butter Wolf, a longtime champion of experimental Hip Hop and Electronic music. He was eager to back her unique blend of elements.

“My approach has evolved over time to get the sound that I want,” Parks says. “I feel like I always knew that I wanted an organic sound ever since I started playing violin. It was hard to explain, but I knew I wanted to kind of like incorporate gear and electronics but I wanted it to be natural and organic at the same time.”

She was set to take part in the second Homecoming, the festival curated by fellow Cincinnati natives The National. But the festival (originally scheduled for May 8 and 9), along with the rest of Sudan Archives’ tour, was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis.

That leaves a lot of down time for writing and recording a new record, which she says should be out by next year.

“I want to experiment more with my voice and the capabilities of where that can go,” Parks says of the new material. “I feel like whenever I’m singing, I’m always singing in my safe spot. I call it my Sade safe spot, because I don’t really consider myself a singer. I kind of feel like I have to. But now I feel like I’m a little more confident in that. I’m ready to experiment with different textures in my voice and different levels of loudness and softness. Every day I’ve been like, ‘What can I do with my voice that is different than what I normally would do?’ ”

She’s also digging into more African music and obscure stuff from previous eras.

“I don’t like to listen to music that’s currently out right now for some reason,” Parks says. “I’m more naturally drawn to something that was archived from the 1970s. I love to find stuff from that era that I’m into now because I want to make music like that. I want people in the future to pick up Athena and be like, ‘Oh, wow, this still sounds cool to me.’”

For more on Sudan Archives, visit sudanarchives.com.