Wielding her violin in innovative ways, Sudan Archives blends folk, ambient, soul, house, and whatever other tradition that she feels is available for the taking.
Photograph by Djeneba Aduayom for The New Yorker; Styling by Marta del Rio; Hair by Preston Wada; Makeup by Jaime Diaz“Do you listen to Sudan Archives?” Most of the time, but not every time, the response to this question is one of confusion. 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.
Sudan has called herself “a visual artist who just happens to make music.” Her material is her body. She has personas, who have put on and slipped out of many different types of Black drag. Early on, Sudan wore flowing cotton dresses and kente skirts, exuding an aura of Earth Mother sobriety. 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.
It was mid-spring, Coachella season. Sudan was preparing for her show in the desert, her second time performing at the music festival. During a rehearsal, in Burbank, I watched Sudan become her performance self. Sudan was initially a one-woman show. Lately, though, she has invited support musicians, including other violinists, to join her onstage.
Sudan, who has been playing the violin since she was nine or ten, is self-taught. She plays by ear. Through the years, she has sporadically worked with teachers, and has made and abandoned efforts to learn sight-reading. She played the bars for Zxari, slower. It went on like this, back and forth, until someone produced sheet music for Zxari.
It was imperative to Cheryl that her daughters know how to move easily between the Black and white worlds. The family, in search of the “best schools,” bounced around Ohio. They landed in old-money communities, dotted with Tudor Victorian homes. The Parks family were the itinerant renters. Reginald served on and off as a preacher at Church of God in Christ, the Pentecostal community. While living in Wyoming, Ohio, a fiddling group that played Irish jigs came to visit the kids’ school.
Sudan settled in Los Angeles with her boyfriend at the time, a popular musician whom she refused to name. She worked waitressing jobs in order to stay afloat, sometimes three at a time. And she kept in sporadic contact with Cat. “She was struggling and didn’t want us to know that,” Cat said, over the phone.
Constitutionally, Sudan is a bedroom producer. She spent these years forming the basis of her production style: the merging of folk elements with electronic music. No song better exemplifies this than the light and springy “Come Meh Way.” The song is a multicultural clash: she sings, in a slight Caribbean accent, over tambourines, handclaps, and an Irish jig—the precocious arranger as tourist. Nearly six years later, it remains Sudan’s most popular track.
We scrubbed off the day’s grime and then surveyed the pools. We draped masks over our faces and struggled to hear each other above the gust in the aromatherapy room. Sudan barely lasted more than three or four minutes in each room. She moved quickly, exhibiting a low tolerance for stasis; I found myself subtly chasing her around the spa. We ended with a vein-constricting plunge into the cold-water basin, and headed upstairs to the common area, dripping water in the elevator.
Sudan had been wavering on whether she would allow me to visit her home studio. In the end, she gave in. After our visit to the spa, she called a Lyft, and we piled into the car. “Brittney?” the driver asked. I turned to her. When was she Sudan, and when was she Brittney? “It’s just hard to change on the app,” she replied, waving the question away. And yet Sudan is clearly reluctant to kill Britt, as the name links her with her twin, who now lives part time in L.A.
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