![]() ![]() She abstracted her strings, filling the atmosphere with synths, stoking a feeling of psychedelia. For her first album, “Athena,” from 2019, she became the picture of the arch Afropunk, who, with her black lipstick and her sculptural, green-tinged braids, emitted a different kind of seriousness. Early on, Sudan wore flowing cotton dresses and kente skirts, exuding an aura of Earth Mother sobriety. She has personas, who have put on and slipped out of many different types of Black drag. ![]() Sudan has called herself “a visual artist who just happens to make music.” Her material is her body. (Like Hendrix, she said.) She has considered using a shock-white Viper, an electric violin modelled on the guitar, which is associated with heavy-metal white guys. She would enter stage left, dressed in pleated leather, and gradually slide onto her knees. While opening for the musician Caroline Polachek, on a recent tour, Sudan occasionally came on during the headliner’s set for a blink-and-you-miss-it solo. (“What else is prohibiting me from being wild?” she recalls thinking.) Her violin now dangles from her, and when she grasps it to play she treats it as an extension of her erotic self. She uses tech that allows her to go completely wireless onstage. Lately, she has equipped herself with a studded quiver, drawing her bow like an archer. She has used choreography inspired by video games: twirling her bow as if it were a sword or a snake (she has one, named Goldie), as if she were a charmer, or a warrior. Like those Sudanese fiddlers, who dance and sing as they play, she does not stand still when she performs. Sudan is the American who enthusiastically joins the diaspora through a kind of awed rechristening. Her music and her performance borrow from the style of Sudanese fiddlers whom she found on YouTube, the “archives” in question. The artist, whose government name is Brittney Denise Parks, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, not in Sudan. For her real and imagined audience of overly Westernized listeners, Sudan has developed a motto: “In so many places in the world, the violin brings the party.” It is the fiddle, she corrects-the preferred instrument of the underclass. Sudan, too, wants to be a provocateur when we spoke, she balked at the idea of performing in an orchestra, where she’d be expected to play “slavery songs.” For much of her six-year public career, which has taken place in the indie/alternative music world, she has made herself the reputational custodian of her misunderstood workmate. “She reminds me of Kanye West, except she’s a woman and a violinist,” one of Sudan’s collaborators said recently. “I can perform my song live and have twenty violins,” she explained. She can coax from the violin the sounds of an accordion, a guitar, a drum. queen, Sudan will pump a riff into her digital-production program to deconstruct it. The songs creep into existence in her basement studio, where the two of them can be alone. Sudan pursues technical, rather than emotional, manipulation. A balladeer trots out the strings, like a show dog, to heighten the atmosphere of desperation in songs that are meant to be performed by destroyed women and repentant men. Sudan (the name that her colleagues, her fans, and, increasingly, her intimates call her) begins composing by striking a riff on one of her five violins, which she uses differently from most other American producers. ![]() She creates a “fiddle-punk sound,” as she describes it, that blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition she feels is available for the taking. How can one listen to the archives of a country? Sudan Archives is, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old musician-a singer, rapper, producer, arranger, lyricist, and violinist. “Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. ![]()
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