The Rebirth of Sudan Archives

Brittney Parks got her start in the church. The violinist, vocalist and songwriter — better known by her stage name, Sudan Archives — had a year of formal training before she began learning the instrument by ear as a part of her congregation’s chamber orchestra.

Later, when she started listening to electronic music and attending raves, she noticed some surprising parallels between the two.

“Church and rave culture intersect because you go up to the altar, you go up to the dance floor, and by the time you leave, you’re supposed to be a different person,” says Parks in a recent documentary short on her Instagram.

This concept of rebirth sits at the heart of her third album, The BPM, which arrived in October after a period of personal tumult for Parks. She had separated from her partner, and the two sold their home in Los Angeles. Parks moved into the one-bedroom apartment in the city that now doubles as her recording studio. 

“After everything, I definitely wanted to do something more upbeat,” says Parks, speaking from the couch of her relatively new digs. “I realized that that’s kind of hard because my music starts in something more cinematic. It’s just not upbeat from beginning to end.”

Parks’s music has always been rooted in the violin. From the swooping strokes of “Confessions” on Athena, her 2019 debut album, to the staccato plucking of “Ciara” off of her rapturously received sophomore effort, Natural Brown Prom Queen, it’s always been a focal point. 

On The BPM, “traditional” violin plays a smaller role than ever before. Instead, Parks treats the instrument like a MIDI controller, creating an entire world of electronic sounds and textures.

“Instead of making a kick on the computer, I start banging on the violin. I’ll then pass that on to my engineer to mold it into a kick,” says Parks. “I feel like it’s very experimental, the way we make sounds and piece it all together. It’s a slow process, but it’s like slow-cooked food; it tastes better when it takes longer.” 

From there, it’s woven into a tapestry of house music, Afrobeats, synth-pop, rap and R&B. Plus, there’s still room for fiddling.

During “Dead,” her furious playing accompanies a throbbing bass and tambourine during the song’s climax. Two songs later, on the coda of “Yea Yea Yea,” her fiddle blends with a string quartet from D-Composed — a Black chamber music collective based in Chicago. Further along, “David & Goliath” moves from cinematic strings to a trap beat to drum and bass and back, all in under four minutes.

To accompany the sonic shift, Parks adopted the persona of Gadget Girl, a tech-obsessed dynamo influenced by Parks’ deep love of science fiction. 

The cover of the record features Parks silhouetted against a white backdrop with wires descending from the upper-right corner and linking to her back. She appears frozen mid-move, as though she was connected to her charging station before fully coming to rest. In the video for “My Type,” the influence of her favorite movie, Minority Report, is apparent as she sits before the same floating screens seen in the film, bathed in the movie’s blue-gray color palette.

Though Parks felt like she had always been this character to a certain degree, it took until the album was nearly wrapped for her to christen her alter ego with a name.

“When I made the song ‘Dead,’ I remember thinking of her,” says Parks. “That song is about me going to a mountaintop all teched-out and encountering a younger version of myself. That’s when I realized she was in all the songs.

“At the start, she’s going to all these different places, and she’s kind of running away,” continues Parks. “Then, when she becomes Gadget Girl, she starts to face all the bullshit because she’s not scared anymore. She’s got the tech.”

Even though, according to Parks, Gadget Girl thrives in isolation, the recording process for The BPM was the most collaborative of her career. She worked on the album for more than two years in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit, employing multiple musicians, producers and even family members.

“I usually make music in my home studio in L.A. and show my family when it’s done,” says Parks. “But this time, I went to Detroit when this album was halfway done. My cousin’s husband picked me up one day after I got there, and was playing beats in the car. I was like, ‘These are dope,’ and we went back to the Airbnb we were staying at and just started making music that night.”

The performances for the album, however, will be a strictly solo affair. See it yourself when Sudan Archives plays the Gothic Theatre on Tuesday, February 10.

“Gadget Girl is not supposed to need anybody because of all this tech,” says Parks. “So I was like, ‘Okay, let me bring my home studio to the stage.’”

“There’s a station that holds the playback, a MIDI controller, keyboard, and then stage left, I have my drum machine, loop station, and all of my pedals that I like to make my violin sound cool,” continues Parks. “I also have this MIDI violin, and you can create all these cool sounds [with] it. You can pluck it, and then someone will scream. Like, it’s weird.”

The setup is just one of the reasons Parks is excited to hit the road.

“I feel like the real Sudan is a really nice girl from Ohio, and that’s how I feel at my core,” she says. “I’m my mother’s daughter in that respect… but when it comes to touring, all of my anger, all of my emotion, I can get it out on stage because I’m fucking crazy like my dad.

“It’s like, if something pisses me off in real life, I’m going to internalize it,” says Parks. “On stage, I feel like I can let it all out.”

Sudan Archives, 8 p.m. Tuesday, February 10, Gothic Theater, 3263 South Broadway, Englewood. Tickets are available via AXS.