Design/layout - Aaron Denton

81355 (pronounced ‘bless’) is a meeting of the minds between three pillars of the Indianapolis music scene; Sirius Blvck, Oreo Jones, and Sedcairn Archives. While the three have worked together in the past, this is their first start-to-finish collaboration, and the result is the stunning and distinctive debut Time I’ll Be of Use.

Simultaneously mystical and stark, somber and danceable, the project grapples with hard-wired truths and imagines alternate realities with better futures. These lucid wanderings amongst the street fires sound like a cross between the ghost of progressive electronic music of the 70s with its innovative eccentricities, and acrobatic word-play delivered with sharp resolve. While surrealist in its metaphors and abstraction, it doesn’t betray a present awareness. Reflecting on Black struggle in the pandemic-ridden and democracy faltering landscape of 2020, each member arrived from a synchronistic space, and the recording process ended up being largely intuitive.

Oreo Jones says about the project, “81355 means so much. It’s love, pain, anger, desire, happiness, hope. I don’t think this project would have been as significant if we hadn’t all connected together this past year under the current climate of the world. All three of us really pushed our individual boundaries, and you can hear that on the record.”

Sirius, with poetry present even in his speaking voice, adds, “It’s a way to carve our story in the sky before we’re gone. This is us choosing to believe that this time, things will be different. It is an affirmation to the universe. This time I’ll see the whole blessing. This time I’ll be of use.”

A collision of patterns and techniques, moments of time, and original cadences, the collaborative output is a sonic and lyrical tapestry rich with vision and style.

Format: Compact Disk
Release Date: May 28th, 2021
Record Label: 37d03d