Over the course of her career as Sudan Archives, self-taught violinist and Cincinnati native Brittney Parks has paired her instrument of choice with forward-thinking songcraft in ways that elevate both her instrument and popular music. On her third album The BPM, she takes her fiddle to the club, melding kinetic beats and intricate orchestrations into musically and emotionally complex structures.
“Hello/It’s me/Did you miss me?/Just take this piece/The best of me,” she offers on opening track “Dead” as snares skitter and an ambulance-siren synth wails behind her; she repeats the proposition in a way that transforms it first into a mantra and then into a password of sorts, with one particular repetition unlocking a maelstrom of strings as the keyboards becoming so distorted as to seem pixelated. It introduces Sudan Archives’ The BPM alter ego, the techno-positive musician Gadget Girl, while also immersing listeners immediately in the record’s dualistic concepts — old and new, human and humanoid, tradition and movement and stillness.
For Gadget Girl, “life’s a game and I got VR goggles,” as Sudan Archives trills on the gently undulating “Touch MEe.” But this avatar, thankfully, doesn’t possess a Panglossian outlook on the future’s promises. While THE BPM does indulge on hedonistic cuts like the slick, right-swiping “My Type” — where she flaunts her rap skills while delighting at how “true desire/ grows in fire” — and the hazy “Ms. Pac Man,” other songs take a sharp-eyed look at heavy topics. “A Computer Love” kaleidoscopes Parks’ voice as she bristles at expectations placed on womanhood, while the quick-moving “Los Cinci” grapples with the idea of never being able to go home again. (Even with that theme lurking, THE BPM is a family affair — Parks’ twin sister Cat and their cousins were in the creative mix, while her turn toward the club honors her parents’ roots in two of America’s crucibles of dance music, Michigan and Illinois.)
On The BPM, Sudan Archives takes a snapshot of existence in the liminal space between the present and 10 minutes from now, a place that on its surface seems limitless in its possibilities for pleasure and movement yet is intractably linked to the past. Navigating this space would be a challenge, but Sudan Archives’ singular vision of pop at least makes it impossible to get stuck.
