Brittney Parks has a brilliant knack for the unusual. Under her stage name Sudan Archives, the singer/producer/violinist has created music that doesn’t fit squarely into a preordained genre space. In her music, I hear elements from the past five decades — SZA’s left-of-the-dial R&B, Erykah Badu’s vulnerable soulfulness, Björk’s twisted electronics, the ’80s synth-funk of Herbie Hancock and the groove of Nigerian twins The Lijadu Sisters. Parks has a keen sense of style that creates earworm hooks out of obtuse musical ideas that are generally not found in R&B. She works with screeching string arrangements and strident synthesizers, leaving behind the hit single format in pursuit of avant-garde compositions. With each of her three albums, all released by Peanut Butter Wolf’s Stones Throw Records, she shows an expansion of creativity and craft. She can pivot between ethereal and guttural, organic and digital, mellow and intense. Parks’ tour opener is a fellow violinist who takes the instrument into new territory. Cain Culto, a Kentucky artist, fuses fringe pop and hip-hop with folk sounds of the Caribbean and Appalachia.
8 p.m. at The Basement East
917 Woodland St.
