The Current

Great Music Lives Here ®
Listener-Supported Music
Donate Now
Sudan Archives 'Homecoming Tour' 2022
Sudan Archives 'Homecoming Tour' 2022First Avenue

Sudan Archives

Tuesday, October 4
7:00 pm

Fine Line

318 1st Ave N, Minneapolis, MN 55401

Doors open at 7PM | Show starts at 8PM | 18+ | Tickets start at $20

More information

As Sudan Archives, Brittney Parks has combined left-field strains of R&B, hip-hop, and experimental electronic music with hypnotic string loops and the fiddling style of West Africa, as heard on a pair of EPs and her debut full-length, Athena (2019). She masterfully bridged the gap between her early glitchy, avant-garde compositions and timeless songwriting on the “stunning, reflective” (Pitchfork) Athena, and returned in 2022 with two new songs (Home MakerSelfish Soul).

The self-taught violinist, singer, songwriter, and producer started playing violin in her native Cincinnati, Ohio. After Parks moved to Los Angeles to study music technology, she started producing beats on a tablet computer with the addition of her vocals and strings, the latter increasingly inspired by immersion in Sudanese music. For her first LP (Athena), she took a collaborative approach and worked with a group of fellow producers who included Paul White, Rodaidh McDonald, and Wilma Archer after self-producing her first two EPs.


As a first-generation Ethiopian born and raised in the city of Chicago, Lulu Be. grew up between two worlds: her family’s deeply rooted Ethiopian culture and the life of an American city kid. It is these worlds that garnered her musical inspiration and created her unique sound combining elements of afrobeats, Chicago house/juke, and hip-hop, topped with her lyrical flow. Illustrious Chicago music blog Fake Shore Drive described it as, “A big gumbo pot stirring with ingredients such as afrobeats, juke, and dancehall.” Never being the school type, Lulu Be. took a long break before deciding to attend Columbia College Chicago to study music engineering. While at Columbia she worked as a studio manager at the renowned Classick Studios where she recorded her first track "Rude Tings." The song unexpectedly blew up with 300k streams on Spotify, 154k on Soundcloud, fan-made dance videos shared by celebrities like Lala Anthony & June Ambrose, and even aired on BBC Radio 1. Soon after Pigeons and Planes named her as an “Artist to Look Out For.” It was then that Lulu Be. decided to turn her long love for music and pursue it full time. Lulu Be. released her first project Lululand on October 13, 2017. The five-track EP shows her versatility as a rapper while creating a new lane for her. The project received a lot of praise from the likes of Fake Shore Drive, Miss Info, Hip Hop Since 1987, and had "Raindance," a song off the EP featured on an Adidas x Urban Outfitters online campaign.