Every Monday, 88Nine music director Erin Wolf shares a sonic gem she found using her nearly 20 years of new-music exploration experience. You can hear all her discoveries at 2 p.m. every Sunday on What’s All This: Adventures in New Music.
“Rez News” is a perfect introduction to the sonic heartbeat of Bizhiki, a newly introduced project centered around intrinsic percussion and passion. Leading the listener in with a crisp drum hit, the song becomes a confluence of voices, forging a new path.
The trio behind this track is Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, Joe Rainey and S. Carey. Jennings is a member of the Bad River band of Lake Superior Ojibwe who grew up powwow-singing around the Lac Du Flambeau and Lac Courtes Oreilles reservations in Central Wisconsin. He was given the name Bizhikiins, "little buffalo" in Ojibwemowin, the language source of the band's name.
Rainey grew up in Minneapolis as a member of the Red Lake band of Chippewa and, like Jennings, was raised with powwow music as a singer and archivist. S. Carey rounds out the group as a multi-instrumentalist from Eau Claire, best known for his vocals and piano work in both his own project and as part of Bon Iver.
Together, the three create the album Unbound, which marries electronics, powwow music and a variety of voices to call to attention an essential Midwest musical history.
The collaboration began in 2015 at the Eaux Claires festival organized on the Ojibwe’s ancestral homelands. 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. You can find their album on Jagjaguwar Records now and catch them live in Milwaukee on Sept. 11 — first for a noontime Studio Milwaukee Session and later that night for a show at Vivarium.
Enjoy "Rez News" below, then be sure to turn into 88Nine at 2 p.m. every Sunday for even more of the best new tunes on What’s All This: Adventures in New Music.
Episode playlist
- Jaco Jaco, “Always Something”
- Thandii, “Call It What You Like”
- Yannis & The Yaw, Tony Allen, “Rain Can’t Reach Us”
- Pixies, “Chicken”
- Why Bonnie, “Rhyme Or Reason”
- Bizhiki, “Rez News”
- Kaeto, “U R Mine”
- My Brightest Diamond, “Have You Ever Seen An Angel”
- Wand, “Seaweed Head”
- Bert Ussher, “The Longest Swim (ft. Katy J Pearson)”
- Cults, “Onions”
