Mike Reed's Separatist Party Releases Sing the Color Blue, Its Thrill Jockey Debut

Mike Reed's Separatist Party, the group led by the Chicago drummer, composer and organizer, released its second album, Sing the Color Blue, on Oct. 23. It is the band's first release on Thrill Jockey, which lists it on vinyl, CD and digital formats.

The album reunites Reed with Rob Frye, Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan, who together make up the trio Bitchin Bajas, along with poet and vocalist Marvin Tate and multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay. According to the album credits, Reed plays drums, percussion and organ; Frye plays tenor saxophone; Crain plays guitar and synthesizer; Quinlivan plays synthesizer; Tate sings; and Gay plays cornet and percussion.

The 11 tracks were assembled over a long period. The album credits say it contains parts recorded over nine years. Initial band tracking began in January 2022 at Constellation in Chicago, and most of the recording was completed between November 2023 and April 2024 at Electrical Audio in Chicago. Crain engineered and mixed the record, and he and Reed are credited as producers and editors.

The label's notes say the album includes a cover of "Restless in Pieces" by the avant-garde cellist Tristan Honsinger and an arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow's Study for Player Piano No. 6, which appears on the record as "Nancarrow Study #6."

The vocal tracks were made in different ways. The notes say "Closing" and "Last Night on Earth" were captured as live in-studio performances, while "Tea Leaves Pt. 2," "If I Were a Song" and "New Angels," which LemonWire reported was the album's lead single, were produced and arranged from material Reed had recorded with Tate over a period of years. Reed says in the notes that the band tried a lot of vocal material during the sessions for this album. "When I couldn't find the right direction, I would go back to these earlier sessions for potential source material," he says. According to the label, Reed reassembled fragments of Tate's words into new lyrical structures, sometimes changing their original meaning completely.

Reed has said the title grew partly out of a friend's critique of his nearly all-blue wardrobe and his long-standing attraction to Bauhaus design. The notes add that he was also struck by a line in a documentary in which a historian described people being instructed to "dance the color blue," and that the title also hints at the blues and Chicago's musical history.

The cover artwork is an original piece by Dmitry Samarov titled "9e." LemonWire, reporting on the album's announcement in September, said the band's self-titled debut came out in 2023 and that a hometown record release performance was scheduled at Constellation in Chicago on Oct. 9.