Reed's, Mike Separatist Party - Sing the Color Blue

Mike Reed’s Separatist Party sophomore effort and Thrill Jockey debut Sing the Color Blue is a recording assembled over numerous sessions, and a testament to persistence and transformation.

The album reunites Mike Reed with Rob Frye, Cooper Crain, Dan Quinlivan (all of the trio Bitchin Bajas), Marvin Tate, and Ben LaMar Gay in a set that moves between composition, reconstruction, improvisation, and song form.

The record unfolded gradually, with Reed returning to the material repeatedly until the album’s final structure revealed itself. Reed reassembled fragments of Tate’s words and performances into new lyrical structures, often changing their original meaning completely.

The results are a record where authorship feels layered rather than singular: songs emerge from live interaction, archival excavation, editing, rearrangement, and re-composition at once.

The title Sing the Color Blue also reflects that spirit of transformation. Reed has said the phrase grew partly out of a friend’s critique of his nearly all-blue wardrobe and his longstanding attraction to Bauhaus aesthetics. He was also struck by a phrase from a documentary in which a historian described people being instructed to “dance the color blue.” Reed reshaped that line into Sing the Color Blue, a title that suggests synesthesia, instruction, abstraction, and also a subtle relation to the blues and to Chicago’s musical history.

In that sense, the title names the album’s larger purpose: turning mood into form, color into sound, and fragments of lived time into music.