'Niineta' by Joe Rainey
Native American vocal traditions and electronic music intersect in Joe Rainey’s Niimeta. The Green Bay-residing Red Lakes Nation Ojibwe pow wow singer (with connections to Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and his Eau Claire music festival) has made an exhilarating statement wherein Rainey’s ancestry confronts synthesized modernity. And the two get along beautifully, often enough jarringly so.
Rainey provides the singing from his own voice as well as archival recordings he has collected of indigenous people's gatherings (his SoundCloud page of pow wow recordings offers an ethnomusicological masters level seminar). One need not know the particulars of Rainey’s ancestral tongue to discern the emotive range he plies from tender tenor heights to menacing guttural bassiness.
Producer/musical accompanist Andrew Broder, with whom Rainey connected over a shared love of hip-hop, casts his partner’s personal and found vocals against soundscapes running a gamut from Laibach cinematic to Aphex Twin glitchy, bumping into genuine melodic hooks that—who knows nowadays?—could give Rainey some fluke pop radio traction.
Though it's probably not advisable that anyone hold their breath on Rainey's name falling from Ryan Seacrest's lips on a top 40 countdown show, Niimeta (the word roughly translates to “being oneself”) is AS approachable in places as it is inventive all the way through. If Rainey takes his work beyond a studio setting, it should be intriguing to see how he would present his indigenous industrialism in concert. Whether that ever occurs, he has set his bar nigh insanely high to make a follow-up pathfinding and compelling as this. But here's believing Rainey has it in him to make it.
