Cassandra Cronin on February 27th, 2017

0

“Time” clocks in at just under 2 minutes, and the Theo Jemison-directed video gives the viewer scant pause to wrack the brain for a musical context within which the 22-year-old artist Sudan Archives might fit comfortably. The instrumentation is a rugged pastiche of synth loops, plucked and arpeggiating violin melodies, and a quietly matter-of-fact vocal delivery, set to a rhythm that at once seems to borrow from the past and define the future.

“Time” leaves the viewer parched, wishing for more music, more context, anything to give us a sense of who she is and where she comes from. The narrative of the video is based on the story of Oshun, the West African Yorùbá Goddess of love, sweet water and compassion. Not unlike the cracked high desert on which she establishes her creative foundation, Sudan’s music is constructed from fragmented melodies and repetitive pithy phrases (“I did that” / “all you wanted was time”), delivered with the vitality of a player not yet disillusioned by the regulatory iron fist of Music Theory and performed with the finesse of an artist whose ear is humbled by many mornings spent in a church ensemble.

So goes the story of Sudan Archives, an artist who grew up in Cincinnati, infatuated at a young age with the fiddle and West African folk music, and drawn eventually to the technology of looping pedals and Apple products. A self-taught violinist, she is working on her debut album for Stones Throw Records. Her diminutive Soundcloud catalog packs a strong kick in the door to the dreamlike world of atypical song structures and improvisations, culminating to more of a diaristic rumination than a pointed manifesto. If we had to generalize her, Sudan Archives is a denizen of that nonconforming utopia beyond history that lives within all of us, at once childlike and ahead of the curve, referencing her motherland but simultaneously archiving its elements into mere blips on her soundscape — as though they could be skipped infinitely, like smooth pebbles across a vast lake.

||| Watch: The video for “Time”

||| Stream: The demo song “Show Me” and the improvisational track “Escape”

||| Live: Sudan Archives will be performing along with Peanut Butter Wolf and Frankie Reyes on March 4 at O Gallery (6367 Selma) in celebration of the opening on artist Erika Moreira’s exhibition “Andando.”