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Unbound on CD

Unbound 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 of singing is entwined with synthesized voice modulation,

and hand drumming is accented with electronic samples and

beats - the harmonies and resonances are equal parts cultural

and musical.

Geographically, Bizhiki is almost wholly a made-in-Wisconsin

project, a collaboration between Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings, Joe

Rainey and the multi-instrumentalist Sean Carey (S. Carey), who

for years has been a secret weapon within the Bon Iver family.

Bezhikiins Jennings grew up singing within the powwow

tradition, around the Lac Du Flambeau and Lac Courte Oreilles

reservations in Central Wisconsin. He now makes his home in

Northern Wisconsin, on the Bad River reservation on the shores

of Lake Superior. He's joined on the album by his adopted

brother, Rainey, a Red Lake Ojibwe powwow singer from

Minneapolis who now makes his home within his wife's Oneida

Nation on the shores of Lake Michigan.

The collaboration between these three musicians first began at

the Eaux Claires festival in 2015. The festival was being organized

on Ojibwe's ancestral homelands, and the organizers didn't feel

right without the inclusion of the native communities who lived

nearby. Bizhikiins 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.

Recording steadily over the course of years - and between

several projects from Bizhiki's members, including two solo

albums (Joe Rainey's Niineta and S. Carey's Break Me Open) -

the trio chipped away at an expansive, ambitious and unique

record that sounds like no other music being made today.

Unbound is a collaboration between a group of singers and

musicians at a particular time and place, exchanging ideas in an

open-ended dialogue deeply considering the resourc