Cleveland's Mourning [A] BLKstar Returns With Sophisticated Suite of New Songs

The seeds for what would become Mourning [A] BLKstar, one of Cleveland's most experimental bands, first started when band members RA Washington and LaToya Kent, who’d been friends since high school, opened for the hip-hop group Shabazz Palaces at Mahall’s 20 Lanes in Lakewood in 2015.

“We played the show, and we were outside talking,” says Kent one afternoon from the band's grungy studio/rehearsal space/living quarters in what must be one of the last un-gentrified corners of Tremont. The group's new album, Ancient/Future, arrives this week, and Mourning [A] BLKstar performs with Gold Mine and Thunderbird & the Shaman at 8 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 2, at Crobar . “[Washington] said he wanted to do this thing and make it a big orchestra with a bunch of musicians and singers. I said, ‘I’m down. Lemme know.’ He called me up, and a bunch of our friends were going to Zombie Proof Studios. When I got there, it was me and him and [producer] Paul [Maccarone], and then James Longs shows up..”

Longs knew of Washington but wasn't entirely prepared for an on-the-spot audition that would turn into a recording session.

“I could sing, but I was only doing karaoke,” says Longs, who sits across from Washington and Kent in a living room that's overrun with mixing equipment and musical instruments. “He said to stop by this house, and I stopped by and thought it was a meet-and-greet. I walked in, and there were people at the house drinking and getting high. It got quiet, and this beautiful woman starts singing from this sheet of paper. She’s done, and RA is typing and hands me a sheet and says, ‘This is you, so let’s see what you got.’ I’m competitive ,so I thought, 'You can't play me.' I sang it based on how I interpreted, and it worked out. That wound up being Blk Musak , our first album. It was just first takes.”

Since then, the group has continued to regularly release new music and tour. In the past year or so, it's gained some serious traction thanks to touring with Lonnie Holley and completing a series of collaborations with Adult Swim, Berlin-based dance company Christoph Winkler and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The group recorded its new album last year at Brad Puette’s Field Day Recordings. Puette has worked on music by the likes of Justin Bieber, Teyana Taylor, Alina Baraz, Ellie Goulding and Kevin Garrett.

“It’s a nondescript building off Hamilton,” says Washington when asked about the studio. “Brad has since moved to L..A. He’s a very accomplished producer and mixer and mastering dude and recording engineer. He had his own situation. We recorded with him, and it sounded good.”

“We agreed to try to be as clean and perfect as possible and learn from what that experience would be,” says Longs. “I think we went back to our roots with Ancient/ Future .”

Washington says the band also wanted to emphasize the collective nature of its approach to making music.

“With collectives, everyone gets a chance to add their sauce to it, and that is something we had never done,” he says. “We usually made everything live. When it was just the three of us in the band, we did it right there on the spot. I think you just do it. There’s no expressed process per se. I think the new album sounds just as dirty and weird as all our other records. We’re on an indie label. There’s no reason for us to consider any level of polish. You can tell we didn’t AutoTune the shit. That would be funny, though, if we did.”

Band members sang lead vocals without the rest of the band in the room. While that represents a departure from previous recordings, the difference isn't noticeable in the finished product. Album opener "Literary Witches," which features a scream and dissonant horns at the onset, has a real intensity to it, and so does the Sonic Youth-like "Along the Red Rim, the Sun Settles."

A suite of songs that pivots around the album title, the album explores “ancestral information” from the last 50 years of popular music and looks to the future too.

“The ‘future’ is us in our most non genre-specific pushing kind of way,” says Washington. “The songs pivot between those two marks. We like the fact that we play so many different styles of songs. I think it speaks to how people should be. It’s very collaborative and it has a lot of dialog implicit in it. And it’s a wink and nod to those bands you love that don’t toe the line on genre. We can just take it a little bit further because, like, we’re Black. We can take it way further on that tip. We have songs that are New Orleans-style bop. We can play that at a rock club with Cloud Nothings.”

The aforementioned tour with Cloud Nothings hit a few cities in the South. Despite a wildly different musical approach, Mourning [A] BLKstar went over like gangbusters.

“One of the beautiful things about the band is that it can play with anybody,” says Kent. “I don’t think we ever said we wouldn’t play with someone. That lends us new audiences. We can be in spaces where people might not listen to the type of music we’re playing. And then we’re in that space, and they’re like, ‘Oh shit. Wait a minute. This is different.' It gives us new exposure and gives them something different. We flip around a lot, even in a show. It’s not just one kind of sound. If you go to a Sade concert, you get that vibe and know what to expect. With us, we have such a large catalog and can pull from songs we recorded in 2016 all the way up to the present and have a surprise moment in there too.”

"Her Song," a beautiful ballad that features echoing vocals and fluttering electronics, benefits from violins courtesy of Caitlin Edwards.

“She’s an accomplished violinist and one of [trumpet player] Theresa [May]’s peeps,” says Washington when asked about Edwards. “She does other stuff to. She has been on Grammy award winning records. She has a nice resume. I told Theresa I wanted to put violins on her song, and she said, ‘I know somebody.’ That’s usually how it goes. One person will want to do something, and another person will know who to get.”

With fall shows in Detroit and Chicago on the horizon, the group will continue to cultivate its national audience. And it's got another record, Flowers for the Living , in the can too. Washington says it'll likely be released in November.

“We’re playing with [Cleveland rockers] Mr. Gnome in the fall," says Washington. "We’ve been wanting to do that. We want to spend this time that we’re not in pandemic to let everyone know we feel passionate about what we’re doing and the aspects of collaboration. We want to keep that message rocking. No better way to do that than to put out more than one record in a year.”

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