“Athena,” the debut album of boundary-defying, violin-driven music by Brittney Parks, is a “soundtrack of the making of a goddess.”
Her pet snake is also “kind of like the theme of the album,” she said. “It’s like me — people are sometimes intimidated by me, just because of how I look. The album is about duality and also about being misinterpreted. People are afraid and they almost scream when they see him, but look how cute and shiny he is! He don’t want to hurt nobody.” The EPs brought Parks an international audience for a playful, sometimes vertiginous style that she forged on her own, working largely alone. Singing about self-invention, connections and independence, she emerged as a solo phenomenon online and onstage. She constructed her music from loops of her beats, her airy voice and her violin, plucked and bowed in phrases that often evoke the modes of African music. For “Athena,” she kept the core of her music — the call-and-response of her voice and violin — but brought in producers and collaborators to enrich and vary her sound. On the cover of “Athena,” she is a bronze nude statue on a pedestal, a goddess holding her violin high.
Continue reading the interview, Sudan Archives Is Making R&B Deeper and Stranger on The New York Times.
Goldie (Brittaney Parks' pet python) appears in the video for “Glorious” from Sudan Archives’ superb debut album, “Athena,” which was released Nov. 1.
With a dozen songs on two EPs that she released in 2017 and 2018, “Sudan Archives” and “Sink,” Parks has already earned a place among boundary-defying R&B innovators like FKA twigs, Frank Ocean, Solange, SZA, Kelela, Sampha and H.E.R. They have been turning R&B into an elastic, futuristic realm where fantasy and self-revelation, otherworldly electronics and real-world musicianship are constantly recombining. With “Athena” she pushes even further, sonically and emotionally, allowing her songs to be more revealing. “I washed away my fears and trusted my own ears,” she sings in “Confessions,” the album’s first single.
Continue reading the interview, Sudan Archives Is Making R&B Deeper and Stranger on The New York Times.
