Artists
Aug 25, 2026
Sudan Archives: Vintage Strings, Modern Gadgets
Ask Brittney Parks where dance music begins, and she won’t start with electronic music, she’ll start with fiddle culture.
The Cincinnati-born violinist, singer and songwriter – better known as Sudan Archives – has built her career by challenging assumptions about the violin; combining traditional string techniques with dance, R&B and experimental pop.
Her distinctive sound isn’t something she describes as consciously planned. “I think it just happens that way,” she says. “Like you don’t think about how you’re gonna have sex. You just have sex.”
For Parks, the comparison is part of a broader point: making music belongs with these fundamentally human activities. “That’s our natural state,” she says. “Dancing, having sex, making our own food. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. But now the natural thing is being a rat in a maze working some specific job so you can do the things you want to do when you have time. Except you’re never going to have time, because you’re always working to pay the rent.”
Our new short film follows Parks in her studio, where she gives a tour of the instruments, production techniques and creative workflows behind her music, including how she uses Move and Ableton Live in her writing process.
From Church to Club
Parks’ love affair with the violin began in fourth grade, when a touring fiddle group visited her school and something clicked almost immediately. “That was the day I knew I wanted to play violin forever,” she says.
Formal lessons followed, but after moving between schools, the church became her classroom instead. “I grew up in a small Black church community,” she recalls. “You’re just pushed into being musical there, even if you’re not. You have to sing in the choir. You have to participate. So everyone in my family became kind of musical.”
Since the church, she’s explored other kinds of communities within rave culture, clubs and experimental music scenes. While some might consider those spaces about as far from church as you can get, Parks sees the parallels straight away. “Rave culture is very similar to the church,” she says. “There's a club, there's a church, there's an altar, there's the stage, there's a DJ, there's a preacher, and then there’s the music being played, and everyone's kind of entranced in it.”
Her tendency to connect these apparent opposites, runs through the way she talks about music history too. One example centres on the violin itself. While the instrument has long been associated with Western classical tradition - conservatoires, orchestras, canonical composers - Parks reminds us that this is only one version of its diverse background. Long before drum machines, synthesisers or DJs, she points out, “fiddlers were making dance music”. They were improvising around familiar riffs, getting people moving and creating the same communal experiences we see today. “Back then, when people used to go to clubs, it was just a fiddler on stage”.
For Parks, that’s precisely why the violin’s history deserves a broader framing.
“When people think of the violin, they think of classical music. But fiddle culture is very Black. Classical culture is very Black too. I’m not only trying to show the Blackness of the violin. I’m trying to show the diversity of it.”
Parks grew up listening to Irish jigs, counts the Czech experimental violinist Iva Bittová among her favourite players, and speaks enthusiastically about the different musical traditions that have shaped the instrument across centuries. The problem, she suggests, isn’t a lack of diversity, but a lack of visibility.
“When people look at me, they may think I’m an anomaly,” she says. “But really it’s actually very normal. It’s not like I’m the first Black person to do what I do. It’s kind of been happening for a long time. It just may not have been documented as much”.
World On A String
Parks has a collection of around six traditional instruments, including the goje, a West African fiddle that has become her go-to.
The differences in sound across her collection often come down to materials. “The tools differ by the environment,” she says. “In Ghana, there are coconuts, so maybe they’re using a coconut for the calabash, maybe lizard skin. Somewhere else, maybe Istanbul, they’re using goat skin and a wooden base.”
The goje is especially distinctive. “It has one string, and it’s the only instrument I have where both the bow and the string are made of horsehair”, she explains.
The Sudan Flick
Parks is known for developing her own approaches to the violin as a percussive instrument. One technique, sometimes called the “Sudan Flick”, came from her dislike of a common percussive bowing sound.
“I’ve seen a lot of ways that violinists can do this percussion thing, where they pick up the bow and slap it back on the string,” she says. “It kind of sounds like a crunch. I hate that sound so much, so I wanted a different percussive technique.”
Her version involves striking the violin itself, particularly when it’s running through an overdrive. “You kind of just hit on the violin like a djembe,” she says. “If you have it plugged into a guitar pedal and the overdrive maxed out, anything you do on the violin will sound like a drum. Just gently pressing the finger on the strings will sound like a djembe. When you slap on the wood, that sounds like a rim shot. If you layer those movements together, and even flick the string, all of those sounds create really cool rhythms.”
Built From Experience
In Parks’ view, creativity comes from living rather than overthinking, a philosophy that shaped some of her early career decisions. Once in a teen pop duo with her sister, she notes how the project didn’t fit where her interests were heading. Her stepfather, she says, wanted the group to rehearse at home in a more traditional way. She wanted to go out, see shows and understand how artists were building their performances.
“I feel like a true artist has to go out and live life in order to make heartfelt songs”, she says. “They thought I just wanted to do drugs and party, but that’s not really what I wanted to do. When I would go to the parties, I would see everyone’s setup. I would see that people were doing shows by themselves. I would be like, ‘okay, what’s that gear right there? I’m gonna get that.’ That’s how I basically made my own setup.”
Today that setup is larger than ever. It used to be just a Roland SP-404, a violin and a microphone. Now it includes a wireless headset mic, wireless violin system, wireless in-ears, a strap-on violin, Ableton Live with multiple outputs sending timecode for synchronised lighting, a Roland SPD-SX, a keyboard, a computer controlling the vocal chain and tracks, a looper and guitar pedals.
“So it’s like 10 Pelican cases now,” Parks laughs. “It used to be just carry-on luggage.”
She’s trying to reduce it again. “I’m trying to keep all the elements that I need, but go back to the beginning too, and sum it down to maybe just two cases.”
On stage, Parks’ main goal is freedom of movement. She once struggled with stage fright before realising that much of it stemmed from feeling physically tethered. Today, she’s designed her live setup so that all the cables are out of her way.
“I just kind of felt held back,” she says. “When you don't have a mic stand in front of you, you’re very naked, but I like it better that way because it makes me move more. I’m a klutz, so I don’t want to have all these wires around me because I’m going to trip.”
Learning Through Live
For Parks, technology is a big part of how she learns, writes and performs. Being self-taught in many areas has shaped her relationship with Ableton Live and other tools.
She uses Live to build parts she cannot yet play continuously. “If I’m playing a violin line, it might not sound the best if I play all the 20 notes together,” she says. “But if I take my time and play one note at a time, then I can piece it together like Legos in Ableton and get that whole movement sounding so good. Maybe by the time the album’s done, I’ve practised enough to where I can play the whole line. That’s how it usually works. I’m using technology to push me to get there.”
Parks notes that she’s drawn to functions like chord generators because she doesn’t approach harmony through formal theory. “I don’t really know theory enough where I could just be whipping out chords all the time”, she says, “so if there’s buttons that have beautiful chords, that can inspire a whole song for me.”
For the avant-pop presets she’s recently made for Ableton Move, she wanted to create simple starting points using violin chords. “I stacked everything up to where one button would be like 10 violins playing one chord,” she says. “I feel like that is a good starting point for someone who’s making beats on it.”
Stacking notes in this way helps Parks to build chord voicings that would be difficult to conceptualise in traditional notation. “I’m creating notes that the violin can’t do on its own, by pitching them”, she explains. “It's a very robotic approach to orchestral composition, but you’re getting these chords you would never get if you were thinking like a traditional composer.”
“I look at writing in my journal the same as making music.”
Parks uses pitch, panning, effects and automation to build larger violin arrangements. Pitching is often a simple way to extend a line without replaying it in another octave. More recently, she has been using a Franklin Audio MP-10 pedal and condenser mic to record dry acoustic violin and processed violin at the same time.
“That’s creating a whole world of music that I wasn’t able to do in the past,” she says. “You can keep stacking and stacking and changing the guitar pedal sound.”
Mixing those layers is a major part of the process. “It’s all about panning in Ableton Live,” she says. “I probably will play 50 to 100 stems, but because they’re all panned, it sounds good. If they weren’t panned, it would sound so bad. I’m learning how to mix in Live, so everything can shine.”
She uses plugins sparingly. Soundtoys Crystallizer can add “a little bit of sparkle,” though she finds it easy to overdo. Auto-Tune can help a lead violin cut through a dense arrangement. Automation also lets her create gestures she might not play naturally.
“If I have a violin line, I can play it like a sustained drone, and I just make it fade up and fade down,” she says. “Normally a violinist would start soft, get louder and fade out. Basically I’m using automation to achieve those techniques so I don’t have to, because what I do is more about short riffs. I’m better at making short, memorable fiddle lines.”
Gadget Girl: A One-Woman Show
Parks records mostly in her home studio, where the environment itself is part of the process. Commercial studios, where she resides in LA, are usually too cold, she says.
“They like the air conditioning cranked,” she says. “I like to feel a little bit like I’m about to sweat. Like if I do a bunch of takes, I might start stinkin’.”
At home, she can control the atmosphere. “I don’t want to have to ask, can I smoke weed in here? I don’t want to have to ask, can you turn the AC down? Sometimes I don’t want to have a bra on. I can’t do that when I go to a studio, because I might poke some eye out or something!”
Parks usually works alone. “My world’s very singular,” she says. “Being alone and coming up with your own ideas makes me feel the best. It’s like you’re journaling. You don’t want to journal with people. Making music is sacred to me. I look at writing in my journal the same as making music.”
When she does work with others, family has played an important role. Her twin sister, cousin and cousin’s husband contributed to recent album The BPM, and Parks says their presence brought out a different energy.
“When I’m by myself, I’m kind of in my feelings,” she says. “When I’m around my cousin, all I want to do is make jokes. That created more personalities, which made the story of Gadget Girl better.”
Gadget Girl, the persona that appears on The BPM, came from a period when Parks felt she could do everything herself.
“It’s like Batman,” she says. “Batman is not actually magical. He just has a bunch of gadgets. I felt like all these gadgets helped me be a better performer on stage, and I don’t need to be superhuman when I have all the tools and access to just do it.”
The character also reflects a solo approach to performance. “She’s using all these gadgets because she doesn’t want to work with people on the stage. She just wants to be in her own world. Instead of a band, she just has a bunch of gadgets.”
Staying Human in this Digital Age
The BPM explores a very poignant theme: how to stay human in this digital age while still embracing the technology enough to enhance yourself. It’s a balance many people seem to be struggling with right now.
“I’m still trying to figure out that balance,” Parks says. “I still don’t know the answer to that. That’s why I made a whole album about it.”
Rather than treating technology as something to embrace or avoid outright, Parks suggests that like any tool, it should be used with intention. “I think we have to look at it like making a meal,” she says. “When you cook, you don’t put a bunch of olive oil in the pan. You just put a little. It’s like that.”
On the topic of technology and specificity AI, Parks is direct about what worries her, while also seeing it as part of a longer history. What she’s heard about AI and music makes her uneasy. “It’s kind of sad, because I’m hearing that people are getting their songs taken by AI,” she says. “But there’s been people stealing from Black music forever. Record labels were taking Black music and giving it to some cute little white group. It’s the same thing we’re experiencing over and over. AI to me is just a different face of something that has been going on forever. It’s not a new thing.”
What is Success Really?
Looking ahead, Parks says she’d like her work to feed into teaching younger artists how to become self-sufficient. She’d still love to write the kind of song that lasts for generations too.
“It would be nice to make a global hit that changes the world,” she says. “Like a Bob Marley song. One of those songs promoting love. Those are timeless.”
Yet success itself feels less important to her than it once did. After record deals and years of building a career on her own terms, she says she’s come to realise that the goalposts have a habit of moving.
“The successes and goals that you check off, they start to become non-existent,” she says. “The real success is knowing that all of that doesn’t matter at all. You just have to be present and keep doing you. Because if you get caught up in the rat race, it’s never going to end.”