i gave this an honest chance, and also sorted through some of her older stuff, which i thought i might like better given the write-up, and it's just not doing it for me - it's lacking any concept of verticality, in contrast to some of the other stuff i've heard recently from youngish black female composers. a commonality with the other singers is that this is fundamentally pop music, and it's not entirely fair to analyze it outside of that spectrum.
i want to draw attention to the specific claim that she's drawing from sudanese music, though, because, if i didn't know any better, i might think she's actually drawing rather heavily from the white fiddling culture of the deep south, which would have a heavy celtic slant to it. while i've brought this up before - celtic music is pentatonic, and consequently sounds "ethnic" when compared to church music, which went out of it's way to destroy certain intervals that it considered "satanic", something that was based on the math rather than anything ethnic - i don't actually think this is a coincidence so much as i suspect that the marketing is trying to gloss over the truth of it in order to present more of a "black" or explicitly "african" identity to the music. this is probably a smart marketing decision, but i'm a stickler for actual honesty and i doubt that this music is substantively informed by anything sudanese at all.
i would expect sudanese music to sound vaguely arabic, perhaps with somewhat of a substrate of major keyed africanisms. worse, a cursory google search suggests that the violin was only introduced to sudan during the colonial period.
does that actually matter? well, it doesn't matter much to me, no. but, i know it matters a great deal to certain other people. maybe it shouldn't....
there's also good reason to challenge the idea that she's self-taught.
as mentioned, it's a bit poppy for me, and i wish she'd extrapolate a bit more on the instrumentation, rather than use the violin as a sort of a gimmick. maybe i should leave it at that.
https://sudanarchives.bandcamp.com/album/athena
i would expect sudanese music to sound vaguely arabic, perhaps with somewhat of a substrate of major keyed africanisms. worse, a cursory google search suggests that the violin was only introduced to sudan during the colonial period.
does that actually matter? well, it doesn't matter much to me, no. but, i know it matters a great deal to certain other people. maybe it shouldn't....
there's also good reason to challenge the idea that she's self-taught.
as mentioned, it's a bit poppy for me, and i wish she'd extrapolate a bit more on the instrumentation, rather than use the violin as a sort of a gimmick. maybe i should leave it at that.
https://sudanarchives.bandcamp.com/album/athena
