Sudan Archives Is Too Unique To Fail

By Emma Madden


This interview starts in silence. Sudan Archives, with her hair styled into a Geisha-like updo, has just come from a music-video shoot and is currently leading me by way of the meditation gardens of Los Angeles's first Self-Realization Center. We bound past sweet-sour smelling ferns, a little waterfall, seats carved from stone. It's 75 degrees, the temperature you'd expect heaven to be. "I used to come here and sit for hours," the artist place on Earth Brittney Parks says, pointing to a patch of green shrouded by trees as we pass a sign that reads NO TALKING.


We settle ourselves onto a stretch of grass overlooking the classic L.A. Vista of rolling hills speckled with mansions, any time as a worker, mirroring Sudan's calming, purposeful tone, coos in our direction, "Please, don't sit on the grass." Sudan floats us along silkily, gracefully; she's been "obsessed with geishas lately." The way they move, the way they look, the way they're disciplined. "For their whole life, they just work towards becoming a geisha. Some days once I'm onstage, I feel like one. The audience aren't even dancing. They're watching and they’re mesmerized — probably due to the skill I'm giving them."


Sudan has been playing music in public for the better segment of five years. Performing solo — which often takes her audience by surprise — she's steadily been building a name for herself because the Singing, Dancing Violinist. At a usual Sudan Archives show, you could find her pizzicatoing while whisking her body around the stage, chopping at the violin strings with her bow, as her body contorts to the sound.


Despite her magnetizing skill, calling Sudan a "violin virtuoso" at this stage might be slightly missing the mark. She prefers the term "electronic composer." Either way, it's undeniable that no one is making music quite like Sudan Archives. Her debut album Athena, which arrives by way of the Stones Throw Records on November 1, evinces Sudan's singular fashion as she blends trap, jazz, R&B, and punk with oral traditions from Sudan and Ghana.


The album charts Sudan's journey from her strict, religious childhood residence in Cincinnati — where she first learned to play violin in church — to her early adulthood in L.A., Where she right now thrives. "Watch me frolic by way of the fields, bitch," she sings on "Confessions" with deserved gasconade. Athena also supports the assists to rewrite Western music's misrepresentation of the violin. "There's this saying that in the event you were a slave, although you played fiddle, you were worth more," Sudan tells me. "So it goes back to Black history with violin culture." It's a history that's gone mostly failed to notice in the U.S. "Researchers and record corporations avoided Black fiddling because several viewed it not only as a relic of the past, although also a tradition identified with whites," writes Jacqueline Codgell Djedje, a well known ethnomusicologist whom Sudan admires.


Carved into stone with a fiddle in hand, Sudan on Athena's album cover alone gives a vision to the often neglected musical instrument. The violin, as championed by Miri Ben-Ari across Kanye West's The College Dropout album and cuts by Twista and Alicia Keys, "was basically the sound of hip-hop" at the turn of the millennium, though Sudan says that even this recent history has almost gone unnoticed. Right now, Sudan makes it impossible to miss.


From the moment she released her self-titled debut EP in 2017, she caught the eye of Pitchfork, the New York Times, and NPR, and was invited to play Coachella that same year. "That's right now how it's supposed to work," she says, "because what I'm doing is so eccentric and un-Western, I didn't think it would fit in, especially not in a mainstream world." Acquiring so much premature attention has meant that she's had to construct her own artsy persona, and all of the trappings therein, in public.


once she felt weary of "the firm side of things" at the begin — the promotion, agencies; everything extraneous to the music — she's since noticed her own way of adoring it. "If I can make it like a game, I can make it fun. If I picture it also deeply, I'm like, 'Oh I'm just a performer,' and yes it begins to feel meaningless." She's thinking about the bigger picture, too: "I have a family member name. The bigger I get, the wealthier my family member will get — Once I perish and stuff. I wanna produce more mentally healthy people who are place on Earth into a global where cash isn't an issue."


Ultimately, Sudan's main priority is to inspire. "And the bigger it gets, the more people you inspire."


While Sudan’s main source of inspiration comes from herself ("I promise I'm trustworthy, and I steer my own wheel," she sings on "Confessions"), she attributes some impact to the unparalleled energy of Erykah Badu. "Somebody notified me the other day that I was the next Erykah Badu and I was like, 'Are you serious!' I don't really worship people, yet I love Erykah Badu 'cause she affected me any time If I was a little bit girl. Her body, how she looks, it kinda reminds me of myself. As soon as you find someone who you could make a similarity with your vibe, and even how you look, it may really impact you a lot, 'cause you’re like, maybe I can do that."


By naming her album Athena and emulating the goddess herself on the album cover, Sudan is hoping to give another spin on a Egyptian myth that's more commonly presented in her Greek form. "I've never seen a Athena that looks like me," she says. "There should be more Athenas that look different." With the image, Sudan hopes to inspire young ladies who, like herself, don't click with modern media dominated by artists who are welcome for their ability to cohere to a trend above their sound. "I visualize a lot of Black ladies doing alt and avant-garde and I'm like, 'Oh wow, that's astonishing yet I certainly don't listen to stuff like that. I like to listen to older stuff, like those R&B classics or just some weird, obscure established music that nobody is aware about. I've habitually been like this. I don't like brands, I don't like trends, I don't like just listening to people just 'cause they have a bunch of followers. I like to stumble upon aesthetics, not just watch what I'm getting fed. I've habitually felt like I'm unique and different, period. Not even musically."


Anyone who finds Athena will be stumbling upon aesthetics, also. Within a tiny space of time Sudan, has gone from "a broke artist making donuts" to a rather revered, narrative-shifting master. Nevertheless what if this album comes out and everything just goes... Bloop?" She asks. By her own trajectory, the very opposite should happen. To use her own words: Watch her frolic by way of the fields, bitch.