(pronounced “bless”) is a voltronized collaboration between three of Indianapolis music scene’s elder statesmen: Sirius Blvck, Oreo Jones, and Sedcairn Archives. While the three have worked together in the past, contributing to one another’s projects as cameos and guest production, this is the first instance in which they have bonded together from conception to execution.
These lucid wanderings amongst the street fires, sound like a cross between ghostly Jean-Michel Jarre swirling bossa nova steeped hip-hop beats with acrobatic and surrealist word-play delivered with sharp resolve. While dream-like in its metaphors and abstraction, it doesn’t betray or surrender a present awareness and protest. When asked about the recording process they described it as intuitive, that they each were coming from a synchronistic space, reflecting on Black struggle in the pandemic-ridden and democracy faltering landscape of 2020.
As suggested in the title, they each see themselves entering a new chapter, and claiming a responsibility to bear witness, drawing inspiration from the likes of dancing biting poetic commentary of the late Naptown residents, Etheridge Knight and Kurt Vonnegut. These three musical vagabonds have met up to build a new world, finding even themselves surprised with the results, a collision of styles, moments of time, and cadences, but collaborative output is a sonic and lyrical tapestry rich with vision and style.
Simultaneously mystical and stark, dancing between different and better futures, alternative realities, yet never leaving this one, this travel through temporal realities and parallel universes is matched by the syncopation of both vocal and musical delivery that plays with rhythm, rhyme, melody and meter.
About the collaborators…
Sirius Blvck is a veteran and a paragon of the Indianapolis hip-hop scene; a scene where you’re as likely to see stage dives as anything else. His music and live performances are step-siblings to the DIY community that occupies many of the same dingy Indiana basements and clubs. The threads of that fierce punk ethic weave their way throughout the majority of his musical releases, which is itself a vestige of that same ethic.
Rapper Oreo Jones makes hip-hop for people with unreasonable expectations of what hip-hop can and should be. A gifted lyricist with an ear for rich, textured beats that check off most boxes on the “new school” and “true school” checklists, Jones is both classicist and futurist. With his original focus on hip-hop culture, Jones has sharpened his craft as a musician touring around the country. Since 2010, Oreo Jones has released over 9 studio albums, participated in artist residencies, and received awards for his work in the hip-hop community.
Initially started as a solo project and releasing several albums under the moniker Grampall Jookabox, David “Moose” Adamson has evolved his music into many triumphant purposeful deviating creations. Under his more recent endeavor and moniker Sedcairn Archives, his album OOBYDOOB is considered a Naptown classic. Moose continues to work in fascinating textures and arrangements, both dance-inducing and descriptive, a strange and wonderful amalgamation of footwork, folk music, hip-hop, and electronica spanning from its first synthesized exclamation to its full and analogue and digital terrain.