When Sudan Archives thinks back to her first dance floor, her mind goes to church not to a nightclub. Born Brittney Denise Parks, the daughter of a pentecostal preacher at the Church of God in Christ in Cincinnati, Ohio, the 31-year-old musician recalls the elation of her father’s congregations, who would raise their hands to the sky and talk in tongues. “People dance and then they go up and down the aisle to get the holy spirit, and it reminds me of dance culture,” says Parks. She compares religious devotion to the club kids in front of their altar: the DJ and the decks. “Church is not like a rave but it’s kind of similar,” she says.
At a launch party for her third album, THE BPM, in London, Parks, dressed in a red unitard with floral gold earrings shining amid her long locs, played to a crowd seeking a release. The singer and violinist had been sick of looking out onto audiences standing still and staring at her, so it must have been a relief that people were dancing. “You can't really tell people what to do, you have to make a product to make them,” she says about the album, which is faster-tempoed than her previous work fusing post-house beats with trap, techno and her signature violin. It’s sexy, sweaty and vulnerable in equal parts with Parks singing about rebounds, homesickness and hedonism: “Ketamine and LSD complements my body,” the lyrics go on Touch Me. “I had a lot of spiritual moments on psychedelics,” she says.
Parks honed her skills as a violinist learning to play hymns by ear for the church choir, but it was the house parties she frequented as a teenager in the mid-west that taught her how to be a musician. She watched as friends and strangers experimented with beats: looping and sampling tracks on their Roland SP-404s — the same scrappy, lo-fi machines she continues to use today. When her parents got divorced, her stepfather, who worked with the Atlanta music label LaFace, encouraged the singer and her twin sister Cat to form a pop duo, N2. But the rules were too much for Parks, who preferred the DIY energy of the house parties and festivals she’d come back from high. At 19, she was kicked out and moved to Los Angeles, where she found a new home at the Low End Theory, an experimental hip hop and electronic music club night and launchpad for producers, at The Airliner in Lincoln Heights.
“There were all types of shows to go to,” Parks says about LA. “Even if I didn't have time to go to all of them just being around it probably did something to me.” The city laid the groundwork for her brash experimentation and the genre-defying artist she would become. A serendipitous meeting at Low End Theory got her signed at Stones Throw, who put out her first self-titled EP in 2017, where Parks gracefully mixed R&B, hip-hop and experimental music with traditional African fiddling, jazz, folk, pop and techno.
Her critically-acclaimed debut album, Athena, came out two years later, inspired by her first trip out the United States to Ghana. On the album’s cover, she presented herself as the image of Afropunk: cast as an athletic nude in a bronze sculpture from antiquity, holding her violin above her head. Natural Brown Prom Queen followed in 2022, where she adopted the alter ego: Britt, who turns up to high school prom “in a pink furry bikini.” In THE BPM, she takes on another character: Gadget Girl.
“She comes into my life and takes over and helps me navigate life so I can have more fun and be more expressive and just be better, because the gadgets make me better,” explains Parks. “But then she gets big headed and the gadgets take over and it's like she's maxed out. And at the end she finds common ground.” It’s a conversation about the digital age we live in, where doomscrolling has us feeling trapped, and how to stay as human as possible while adapting to advances. “People say that technology can be so inhibiting but for me as a musician it’s made me better,” she says in a short documentary made for the album’s release. “I’m more free.”
She’s particularly excited about the MIDI violin she used in the studio, which can be plugged into the synthesizer to create trumpet and horn sounds. But Parks is also a traditional music devotee. She almost exclusively listens to meditation tracks and sufi music when she’s chilling in her Los Angeles loft: devotional songs passed down through the generations. And she collects string instruments from around the world with the hope of preserving their heritage in some small way: including a Persian kamancheh from Istanbul and a Hausa violin from Ghana, whose bow and single string is made of horse hair, which she used in the new album.
THE BPM might be her most personal album to date. It was made with the help of her family and close friends: her cousin’s fiancé Eric Terhune, offered up drums; her sister helped with the hook on the rap in Los Cenci; while her cousin contributed to the boisterous track Pac Man, which Parks says defines the silliness of their relationship. She travelled to her parents’ hometowns of Detroit and Chicago, subconsciously soaking in the techno and house scenes that emerged in the 80s and 90s there; and met D-composed, a Black chamber music collective from Chicago that brought depth to the album. “When you make an album that's this produced, you don't want the strings to get lost,” she says.
The songs themselves are a collection of memories — good and bad, says Parks, who sometimes feels like “life is going so fast.” DEAD recalls an intimate moment in Detroit when she cried about her breakup to her cousin, and they both ended up sobbing about, one of deep love and care for one another. Heaven Knows is about her dad, who “stole something out of my ex-boyfriend's suitcase. And he was mad about it, because he took it from his suitcase. I had to confront my dad about it and he said sorry because he's bipolar so sometimes he just takes things and he didn't mean to. It created this whole conflict.” The song was her saying: “you're not perfect but I still love you.”
There’s a contemplative pause with Los Cenci, which is more string-heavy than the other tracks, and grapples with the idea that she can never return to Ohio, which she found creatively stifling, and explores the torment that can come from being newly single, with a slice of attitude. “Yeah, I'm done with people pleasing, so I'm mean right now,” she croons.
Parks wants the world to know that the fiddle can be fun: shedding the stuffy image of a western violin player in an orchestral setting. Violins used to start the party, she says, “usually in pubs, if you go way back, all different types of people would dance to the fiddle.” She hopes THE BPM will be part of that legacy. “It's healing to dance,” she says.
THE BPM is out now. Visit sudanarchives.com for tour dates and tickets.
