Bizhiki – “Gigawaabamin (Come Through)” [Video]

Bizhiki — a made-in-Wisconsin collaboration between Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, Joe Rainey Sr., and multi-instrumentalist S. Carey (Bon Iver) — and their new album Unbound (out July 19th via Jagjaguwar). Unbound, the new album by Bizhiki, opens with a single, trembling chord that rises and descends before meeting a warm, beguiling voice, a voice singing in a tradition that’s been heard in this northern river country for millennia. The music that follows is a soulful dialogue between the ancient tradition of powwow singing and a contemporary musical palette. On Unbound, the powwow style is entwined with synthesized voice modulation, and hand drumming is accented with electronic samples and beats. The harmonies and resonances on this album are equal parts cultural and musical.

Many of the songs on this album go back to when the spirit of the Bizhiki was forged, nearly a decade ago, on the banks of Wisconsin’s Chippewa River. Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, one of the two principal Native voices on the album, remembers getting an invitation to play the Eaux Claires festival in 2015. “I was driving up in Cornucopia, Wisconsin — way out in the middle of nowhere —and I got a call.” There was a festival being organized on the Ojibwe’s ancestral homelands, and the organizers wouldn’t feel right without the involvement of the land’s native communities. “I agreed,” he remembers. “And I told them I wished more people thought like 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.’”

You can pre-order the album HERE.