Bizhiki - Unbound

Bizhiki - Unbound 

Unbound opens with a single, trembling chord that rises and
descends before meeting a warm, beguiling voice, a voice
singing in a tradition that’s been heard in this northern river
country for millennia. The music that follows is a soulful
dialogue between the ancient tradition of powwow singing and
a contemporary musical palette. On Unbound, the powwow
style of singing is entwined with synthesized voice modulation,
and hand drumming is accented with electronic samples and
beats — the harmonies and resonances are equal parts cultural
and musical.
Geographically, Bizhiki is almost wholly a made-in-Wisconsin
project, a collaboration between Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, Joe
Rainey and the multi-instrumentalist Sean Carey (S. Carey), who
for years has been a secret weapon within the Bon Iver family.
Bezhikiins Jennings grew up singing within the powwow
tradition, around the Lac Du Flambeau and Lac Courte Oreilles
reservations in Central Wisconsin. He now makes his home in
Northern Wisconsin, on the Bad River reservation on the shores
of Lake Superior. He’s joined on the album by his adopted
brother, Rainey, a Red Lake Ojibwe powwow singer from
Minneapolis who now makes his home within his wife’s Oneida
Nation on the shores of Lake Michigan.
The collaboration between these three musicians first began at
the Eaux Claires festival in 2015. The festival was being organized
on Ojibwe’s ancestral homelands, and the organizers didn’t feel
right without the inclusion of the native communities who lived
nearby. Bizhikiins Jennings remembers getting an invitation to
play the festival and thinking “I wish more people would say this
— that instead of reading from some land acknowledgement,
that they would say ‘we're gonna give your people space and
just invite you to do what you wanna do.’” The open-endedness
of the initial invitation and the “let’s just do something together”
spirit continues to inform Bizhiki’s process.
Recording steadily over the course of years — and between
several projects from Bizhiki’s members, including two solo
albums (Joe Rainey's Niineta and S. Carey's Break Me Open) –
the trio chipped away at an expansive, ambitious and unique
record that sounds like no other music being made today.
Unbound is a collaboration between a group of singers and
musicians at a particular time and place, exchanging ideas in an
open-ended dialogue deeply considering the resources that
we’re trying to share, generations into the future.

Tracklisting:
Side A
1. Franklin Warrior
2. Unbound
3. SGC
4. She’s All We Have
5. Rez News
6. Nashke!
Side B
7. Float Back By
8. Trying To Live
9. Gigawaabamin (Come Through) (feat. Mike Sullivan)
10. Call Me Home
11. Medicine River