Surround: Niecy Blues

About this event

Surround seats the audience onstage with the artist – where each note and whisper is shared in a collective resonance

South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: “I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves... whole days roll by, forgetting about the body.” Her full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations – often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel they read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure – “the permission to imagine leaving.”

Recorded in her current home of Charleston, they characterize the album’s mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, “talking myself off a ledge.” The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: “My first experience with ambient music was church – slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar... even if you don’t believe, you feel something."

Presented by the Arthur Zankel Music Center with the generous support of Jimmy Zankel '92 and the Zankel Music Fund.'

Visit the Arthur Zankel Music Center website for tickets.