Tribe Called Red overlays electronics on tradition
For nearly a decade, A Tribe Called Red — an indigenous DJ collective out of Ottawa — had been throwing parties and creating tracks that blended traditional powwow chanting and drumming with the heavy builds and breaks of electronic dance music.
With two albums behind them and performance credits at festivals like Coachella and Afropunk, the band was being told to think big. “You guys don’t have to just record an album in your living room anymore,” Ehren Thomas, who performs under the name Bear Witness, remembers somebody telling them.
What the band members wound up with is a sprawling conceptual and collaborative album called “We Are The Halluci Nation” that, as with their previous work, knits together elements of dancehall, R&B, drum ’n’ bass, dubstep and several other genres of dance music with sonics of indigenous musical customs. Every track on the album features a guest, and every track manages a political edge while being eminently danceable.
For A Tribe Called Red — set to play the Independent on Thursday, July 27 — mixing dance music and politics has always been as central to the members’ identity as mixing the traditional with the new. To separate politics from the spaces they’ve created for indigenous audiences (and their very existence as a band) would be nearly impossible.
“In the beginning, the idea was just to have a dance party, just to make dance music,” Bear Witness says. “The thing is when you do that as indigenous people and for an indigenous audience, especially in an urban setting, that becomes a political statement very quickly.”
Still, there’s a sense that with this new album, Bear Witness and the other two members, Ian “DJ NDN” Campeau and Tim “2oolman” Hill,
have fully mastered this mix of disparate sounds and intents.
“The missionaries never hid their perspective/ Perspectives of land, they would rather see us disappear/ Recycle the prayers/ The people/ This is my body which is given to you/ The people/ This is my blood/ We are not a conquered people,” guest vocalist Saul Williams sings over rising and falling chants and dubstep drops on “The Virus.”
On the second-to-last track, John Trudell, the late Santee Dakota poet, musician and activist, who is also known for being the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969, recites a poem over the vocals of Tanya Tagaq, the Inuk throat singer.
“Confronted by the ALie Nation/ The subjects and the citizens/ See the material religions through trauma and numb/ Nothing is related/ All the things of the Earth and in the sky/ Have energy to be exploited/ Even themselves, mining their spirits into souls sold/ Into nothing is sacred, not even their self/ The ALie Nation, alienation,” Trudell says.
On their latest album, A Tribe Called Red creates its own nation of sorts, or rather gives the one it has already created a name. The members do this metaphorically, with the wide cast of guest artists they feature. But they also do it explicitly, with the album’s title and the patch featured as the cover art.
The name of this nation — the Halluci Nation — was something of a gift from Trudell. After their management had told them they could dream more widely than they ever had before, they started working on a list — the biggest names they could think of. Right at the top was Trudell.
But before they even tried to get in touch with him, he reached out to them. The band had been passing through New Mexico on tour. When they got to the venue, they heard Trudell would be there. He wanted to introduce them and he wanted to meet them.
“It was one of those amazing moments where you meet somebody who is such a huge influence, that you look up to so much, and right away he shook my hand and knew my name,” Bear Witness says. “Before I could tell him all the things I wanted to say, all the things you want to say to a person like that ... and he just kind of shut me down and started telling me what our music meant to him.”
It was a surreal moment made even more surreal by what happened next. Before Bear Witness could bring up the idea of a collaboration, Trudell started handing him sheets of poetry. He offered to record the poems if A Tribe Called Red wanted to do something with them.
Trudell passed on more poetry over the following months, including one that became the album’s title track.
“We have been called the Indians/ We have been called Native American/ We have been called hostile/ We have been called Pagan/ We have been called militant/ We have been called many names/ We are the Halluci Nation,” he wrote.
They knew immediately that the poem was what they were looking for to pull together their themes, and tell the story they’d been looking to tell. Bear Witness and the others ran with it. “It all became really real, really fast.” So fast, in fact, they realized after the concept had settled in that they had never told Trudell how central that poem was to the album they were crafting.
Not long before Trudell passed away — he never lived to see the final product, though his voice and words bookend the album — Bear Witness sent him a quick email and a photo of the patch.
“He wrote me back just really quickly to say thank you and that ‘The Halluci Nation is real.’ ”