Sing The Color Blue - Translucent Blue Vinyl
-
Label
- Thrill Jockey
-
Release date
- October 23, 2026
-
Pressing
- Original
-
Conditions
- New
-
Vinyl
- Color
- Blue - Transparent
Description
Mike Reed’s Separatist Party sophomore effort and Thrill Jockey debut Sing the Color Blue is a recording assembled over numerous sessions, and a testament to persistence and transformation. The album reunites Mike Reed with Rob Frye, Cooper Crain, Dan Quinlivan (all of the trio Bitchin Bajas), Marvin Tate, and Ben LaMar Gay in a set that moves between composition, reconstruction, improvisation, and song form. Part of what gives Sing the Color Blue its character is the unusual length and shape of its creation. Elements of the album reach back across nearly a decade, starting in January 2022 at Constellation in Chicago and the majority of the recording completed between November 2023 and April 2024 at Electrical Audio. The record unfolded gradually, with Reed returning to the material repeatedly until the album’s final structure revealed itself. Sing the Color Blue includes both a cover of the avant-garde cellist Tristan Honsinger’s “Restless in Pieces” and an arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow’s Study for Player Piano No. 6, placing the record in dialogue with two very different but equally iconoclastic minds. Elsewhere, the vocal material is treated with striking flexibility. Some pieces were captured live in-studio performances, including the opening track “Closing” and “Last Night on Earth,” preserving the volatility and immediacy of the band in real time. Other Pieces , including “Tea Leaves Pt. 2,” “If I Were a Song,” and “New Angels,” were produced and arranged from material Reed had recorded with Marvin Tate over a period of years. “Over the years I reordered several hours of Marvin for various projects. During the sessions for this album we tried a lot of vocal material. When I couldn’t find the right direction, I would go back to these earlier sessions for potential source material.” Reed reassembled fragments of Tate’s words and performances into new lyrical structures, often changing their original meaning completely, and in some cases provided Tate with melodic lines to sing against or within that material. The results are a record where authorship feels layered rather than singular: songs emerge from live interaction, archival excavation, editing, rearrangement, and re-composition at once. The title Sing the Color Blue also reflects that spirit of transformation. Reed has said the phrase grew partly out of a friend’s critique of his nearly all-blue wardrobe and his longstanding attraction to Bauhaus aesthetics. He was also struck by a phrase from a documentary in which a historian described people being instructed to “dance the color blue.” Reed reshaped that line into Sing the Color Blue, a title that suggests synesthesia, instruction, abstraction, and also a subtle relation to the blues and to Chicago’s musical history. In that sense, the title names the album’s larger purpose: turning mood into form, color into sound, and fragments of lived time into music.
Tracklist
2. New Angels
3. Nancarrow Study #6
4. Tea Leaves pt 1
5. I Want 7 To Be Around Forever
6. Last Night on Earth
7. A Minor House of Charity
8. Tea Leaves pt 2
9. Restless in Pieces
10. Ben’s New Hit
11. If I Were a Song
Avis (0)
