Liquid Music

Joe Rainey: Niineta
With Owls & Andrew Broder

Sat, Oct 28, 2023, 7:30 pm
The Lorraine Boccardo Theater, Center for the Arts at Kayenta (UT)

“You’ve never heard anything quite like Joe Rainey’s avant-garde Pow Wow music.” —Pitchfork

Pow Wow singer Joe Rainey performs his debut collection of songs, backed by electronics and Owls quartet, arranged by collaborators Andrew Broder & William Brittelle.

Niineta, Joe Rainey’s debut album on 37d03d is a landmark in modern Indigenous music. These are bold, electrifying songs that recontextualize the ancient Pow Wow sound in strange, new in-between places. Niineta (translated from Ojibwe, meaning ‘Just Me’) begins with Andrew Broder’s churning avant-garde beats, configured and hand-made to support Rainey’s original melodies—tunes written from a lifetime of competitive Pow Wow singing and drum group archiving. All of this is embraced by and interwoven with celestial strings, arranged by Broder and William Brittelle, performed by “dream group” (The New York Times) Owls, giving Rainey’s music a cinematic and ecstatic lift. The program opens with repertoire from Owls, flows into a duo set by Rainey and Broder, and powerfully concludes with all forces combined.

Developed by Liquid Music. Commissioned and premiered by The Great Northern, Cedar Cultural Center, and Ecstatic Music Festival. Presented in partnership with The Center for the Arts at Kayenta.

Located in the gorgeous desert of southern Utah, The Center for the Arts at Kayenta produces and presents over 50 events annually, with a total of approximately 120 individual performances, across the artistic disciplines of theater, music, dance, storytelling, and humanities-based lectures. Its vision is to become the Southwest's premier venue for professional multi-disciplinary performing arts in an intimate space, fostering awareness, appreciation, education, and enjoyment of diverse artistic forms and ideas.