Sing The Color Blue [LP]

Mike Reed's Separatist Party - Sing The Color Blue [LP]

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.

Elements of the album reach back nearly a decade, starting in January 2022 at Constellation in Chicago, with the majority of the recording completed between November 2023 and April 2024 at Electrical Audio. Sing the Color Blue includes both a cover of avant-garde cellist Tristan Honsinger's "Restless in Pieces" and an arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow's Study for Player Piano No. 6. Some pieces were captured as live in-studio performances, while others were produced and arranged from material Reed had recorded with Marvin Tate over a period of years, reassembling fragments of Tate's words into new lyrical structures.

The title reflects that spirit of transformation, growing partly out of a friend's critique of Reed's nearly all-blue wardrobe and his attraction to Bauhaus aesthetics, reshaped into a phrase that suggests synesthesia, abstraction, and a subtle relation to the blues and Chicago's musical history.