Mike Reed 
This album hit hard with a single a couple of weeks back and, now that the full album is in hand, it stands as a permutating document of isolation, loneliness, and the need for community filtered through the spiritual jazz legacies of the Organic Music Society, Nigerian funk, and the Arkestra. The record, led by percussionist Mike Reed, brings together a cross-section of talent from his Chicago surroundings. Steered by Reed’s rhythms, the record is embellished by performances from Bitchin’ Bajas — lacing in flute, sax, synths, and guitar — Ben LaMar Gay’s assorted brass, and poetry from Martin Tate. Tate, who’s been leading D-Settlement for years, adds a sense of urgency and invective to the mix. The band behind him embrace a broad aesthetic, not unlike D-Settlement themselves, though less indebted to funk and more so to the harbors of African psych, kosmiche, and exploratory jazz.
Tate acts as the record’s constant, a vision drilled down and definitive among an ever shifting backdrop. Like a superimposed image burned into the TV screen as the channels flicker behind him, Tate’s poetry speaks to alienation, both self-imposed and state-imposed, hiding away from a hostility that’s woven into history, society, fabric, and function of a nation built with its hackles already raised and unwelcoming. There’s hope in his screed as well, though, a sense that what’s been systemically lacking can be lightened through community and connection. The band won’t sit still, won’t commit to a niche, but that only adds to the sense of vibrancy and the living nature of community. They explore dissonance among the grooves, welcoming unsanded moments while still locked into a sense of propulsion. Reed posits, “People tend to lean in more when they feel something got a little weird, but they can’t quite put their finger on it.” That sentiment is the core of The Separatist Party. Psych-jazz, spoken word, motorik mesmerization, and ‘70s African rock — there’s hydra of rhythm and an encyclopedic approach to the record, but its all woven into a tapestry whose eclecticism forms patters the more its studied, cosmoses on cosmoses the more the eye wanders.
Support the artist. Buy it HERE.