Niineta

Rainey is a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe people, located near Minneapolis. He didn’t grow up on the reservation but his music makes amazing use of field recordings made of Ojibwe competitions and performances. The context of these recordings come through—the first seems to come from, or to, someone in prison—and the surrounding electronics create a creative dialectic. Who gets to chant? Who owns the drums? Can everything simply slap?

Joe Rainey is a pow wow singer from the Red Lake Ojibwe tribe of Minnesota. On this album, he mingles the traditional sounds of pow wow — vocal chants and hand drums — with strings, thick blasts of synth, electronic noise. In addition to his own voice, which is heard so closely sometimes it’s like he’s singing right inside your skull and other times distorted through a crackly jailhouse phone line, there are samples of pow wow recordings, which are themselves distorted and warped. In its use of archival materials alongside 21st century production, this music brings to mind Moor Mother’s attempts to grapple with history and prove that, in Faulkner’s formulation, the past isn’t dead — it’s not even past. But it’s not morose or grim; it’s frequently joyous, as when the voices, piano, and strings soar on “easy on the cide,” while a sampled hand drum is pushed through electronics to become a thumping dub techno rhythm worthy of a Basic Channel 12”.