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.
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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.
