Mike Reed's The Separatist Party
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8:30pm.
Mike Reed – drums, percussion, organ
Rob Frye – tenor saxophone, flute, percussion
Cooper Crain – guitar, synthesizer
Dan Quinlivan - synthesizer
Marvin Tate – vocals
Ben Lamar Gay – cornet, percussion
- - -
Mike Reed's The Separatist Party announces their new album, Sing the Color Blue (out October 23rd via Thrill Jockey) and, in conjunction, release its lead single, “New Angels.” Sing the Color Blue is a recording assembled over years of sessions, rehearsals, false starts, and renewed approaches, eventually becoming a document of both persistence and transformation. Sing the Color Blue 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. It follows 2023’s self-titled debut, praised by the New York Times as “ethereal, odd-metered, electrified airspaces with whiffs of Ethio-jazz.”
The unusual length and shape of Sing the Color Blue’s creation is part of what gives the album its character. Elements reach back across nearly a decade, with initial band tracking beginning in January 2022 at Constellation in Chicago and the majority of the recording completed between November 2023 and April 2024 at Electrical Audio. The project depended on a deep archive of session material that Reed recorded with poet/vocalist Marvin Tate, which he’d return to repeatedly until the final structure revealed itself. Today’s “New Angels” grew from these sessions.
Rather than treating those sessions as fixed songs, Reed used them as a source library. He 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 result is a record where authorship feels layered rather than singular: songs emerge from live interaction, archival excavation, editing, rearrangement, and re-composition at once. This approach is something Reed refers to as “collage recording”
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 project: turning mood into form, color into sound, and fragments of lived time into music.
Listen to “New Angels” [https://mikereed1.bandcamp.com/track/new-angels]
Pre-order Sing the Color Blue [https://mikereed1.bandcamp.com/album/sing-the-color-blue]
Website [https://mikereed-music.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/reedmicj/]
Mike Reed – drums, percussion, organ
Rob Frye – tenor saxophone, flute, percussion
Cooper Crain – guitar, synthesizer
Dan Quinlivan - synthesizer
Marvin Tate – vocals
Ben Lamar Gay – cornet, percussion
- - -
Mike Reed's The Separatist Party announces their new album, Sing the Color Blue (out October 23rd via Thrill Jockey) and, in conjunction, release its lead single, “New Angels.” Sing the Color Blue is a recording assembled over years of sessions, rehearsals, false starts, and renewed approaches, eventually becoming a document of both persistence and transformation. Sing the Color Blue 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. It follows 2023’s self-titled debut, praised by the New York Times as “ethereal, odd-metered, electrified airspaces with whiffs of Ethio-jazz.”
The unusual length and shape of Sing the Color Blue’s creation is part of what gives the album its character. Elements reach back across nearly a decade, with initial band tracking beginning in January 2022 at Constellation in Chicago and the majority of the recording completed between November 2023 and April 2024 at Electrical Audio. The project depended on a deep archive of session material that Reed recorded with poet/vocalist Marvin Tate, which he’d return to repeatedly until the final structure revealed itself. Today’s “New Angels” grew from these sessions.
Rather than treating those sessions as fixed songs, Reed used them as a source library. He 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 result is a record where authorship feels layered rather than singular: songs emerge from live interaction, archival excavation, editing, rearrangement, and re-composition at once. This approach is something Reed refers to as “collage recording”
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 project: turning mood into form, color into sound, and fragments of lived time into music.
Listen to “New Angels” [https://mikereed1.bandcamp.com/track/new-angels]
Pre-order Sing the Color Blue [https://mikereed1.bandcamp.com/album/sing-the-color-blue]
Website [https://mikereed-music.com/] | Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/reedmicj/]
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Where is it happening?
3111 N Western Ave Chicago IL 60618, 3111 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60618-6409, United States
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Host or PublisherConstellation Chicago
