Spectreview: Joe Rainey – Niineta
Released: May 20, 2022
Electronic
(Traditional Pow Wow)
(Vocal)
(Avant-Garde)
-WITCH HAZE-
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The subjective nature of music also means it can act like a mirror, reflecting your own ideas and views back at yourself. It’s hard for someone like me to listen to a record like Niineta, as gorgeous and vibrant as it is, without hearing a current of heartbreak. That’s what makes reviewing it difficult; it would be easy to interpret its treated Pow Wow samples and nervy punches of noise as wholly sorrowful, even confrontational. What it is, instead, is a more holistic celebration of Rainey’s history – a statement that’s intensely personal but also couched in the culture he hopes to protect.
The album, co-produced by Andrew Broder and featuring collaboration from Justin Vernon’s 37do3d collective, takes the vocal language of Pow Wow to genuinely new places while capturing the spiritual transcendence of the practice. Akin to Vernon’s recent output (note Rainey’s voice on Bon Iver’s “We”), it pairs the frictional bombast of noise with the raw beauty of layered melody. That tact blooms first on “b.e. son,” a dedication to Rainey’s lineage that sees his lower register soaring among violin, cello, and a crescendoing loop of stuttering programmed drum. You hear that flavor of percussion keeping beat across the record, from the shuddering heartbeats of “easy on the cide” to the bouncing basketball on “no chants” to the rumbling engine on “jr. flip.”
The cumulative effect of Rainey’s voice and Broder’s production is hypnotic, capable of clouding the head and sating the heart. Without much to go on, to me it seems like a wondrous introduction to the world of Pow Wow singing simply by its range of expression it encapsulates. You hear Rainey’s gentle waver on “ch 1222,” amid a high-passed heartbeat, and feel the comfort of its lullaby. You hear the staunch pride on “b.e. son” overwhelm your ears, hear that pride turn itself over on “jr. flip,” feel the crushing power of history in Rainey’s octaved vocals of “easy on the cide.” Throughout the record, each song is mixed so that the voice cuts through, adding key touches (like the faint switch into gunfire on “easy on the cide”) that punctuate, or puncture, the mood. At its most powerful – like on the sweeping “bezhigo” – it’s stirring, uncategorizable and difficult to recall anything quite like it.
Niineta, which loosely translates as “just me,” comes from Rainey’s drum brother Michael Migizi Sullivan, a professor of Ojibwe Language and Culture who aims to revitalize Ojibwemowin through the education of Anishinaabeg youth. It’s a curious term for a record that’s both celebratory and defensive of Pow Wow practice. Rainey – like many Native Americans in his position, I can imagine – must feel caught at the crossroads between spreading the magic, allowing its survival as its guardians fade, and running the risk of exploiting it for a populace who have long upheld generational cruelty against his people. It’s Sullivan’s voice you hear as the record opens, on a phone call between here and the Jackson Correctional Institution, and it’s a tone-setting moment that also guts in its symbolism – an incarcerated man singing strong, to be heard.
Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people