Far Out Sounds
In April 2016, Paul Bryant Hudson, a musician born, raised, and currently residing in New Haven, took a business trip to London to do some production work. After a few days in the city, Paul attended a concert at a strange venue in London’s Deptford district: a former bodega, converted into a private home. As soon as he walked in, the host greeted him personally. “He was just like, ‘Hey, welcome to my crib, the beer’s in the fridge,’” Paul said. “There was something really pure about it.”
The show was part of a series of popup concerts held in London and 401 other cities around the world, orchestrated by a company called Sofar Sounds. Founded in 2009, Sofar Sounds curates unconventional shows in eclectic venues. Fans apply for tickets before the location or artists are announced; in many cities, it’s not easy to get in. On the day of the show, an email is sent out revealing the address. The audience doesn’t find out who’s playing until — well, until whoever it is begins to play. Sitting on a crowded living room floor, soaking in a mix of hip-hop, techno, and spoken word, Paul fell in love with Sofar. He even ended up playing a few gigs around London with some musicians he met that night.
But to Paul, there was one glaring problem. All of the performers at that first show were white. He was one of two black people in the entire room. “When you have a cool thing that’s hinged on exclusivity and privilege, lines are drawn,” Paul said, “and whether you want to or not, those lines are sort of parallel to racism and classism.” With high ticket prices and vast genre divides, concerts seldom overcome these forces. The national Sofar team has held this issue in mind. “We are constantly, constantly talking about diversity in all aspects — racial makeup, sexual orientation,” said Sofar Head of Communications Sarah Lipman. “When we’re curating artist lineups, we want there to be something for everyone to latch onto.” After flying back across the Atlantic, Paul set out to establish a monthly Sofar series in New Haven that would expand this vision — featuring local acts and challenging norms of exclusive community institutions. “I just thought how cool it would be if I could recreate this and throw a spin on it, and challenge that standard,” Paul said, “and make it look like the community I’m from.”
I knew nothing about Paul’s vision when, this past summer, I danced the night away at Neville Wisdom Fashion Design Studio, my belly bloated with pizza, tipsy from an IPA whose name now escapes me. The occasion was New Haven’s third installment of Sofar Sounds. I remember swirling about barefoot amidst people and mannequins as the singer called the crowd to echo him:
“ohohOh! ohohOh! ohohOh! oh, oh”
“ohohOh! ohohOh! ohohOh! oh, oh”
I didn’t know most of the people there, but I’d come to the show with a few of my friends. We linked arms and spun around and around, grinning as passersby peered in at the scene from the dark sidewalk outside. The singer continued:
“I don’t wanna hurt nobody, or be alone
So won’t you take me back to Africa, or Barbados
Take me to the motherland”
I gazed at the vocalist as he shuffled around in Nike flip flops, his short dreads flapping about and his thick-framed glasses glinting in the white Christmas lights. His bandmates bobbed their heads in a semicircle off to the right, wobbling from side to side. Who were these sorcerers, I thought, conjuring joy out of thin air, casting a spell with their chords, singing us into solidarity? Their name was Phat A$tronaut.
Though I’d briefly introduced myself to Paul at the summer show, we met for the first time in earnest at Anchor Spa, just off the New Haven Green. Paul is friends with the restaurant’s owner, Steve; he asked for a half-order of wings, but Steve brought him a full platter.
Paul has a close-trimmed beard and neat mustache, short, frizzy hair, and a round face, his nose occasionally adorned with a silver stud. He has a rich, low, froggy voice and a belly laugh that tends to come in three quick bursts. He’s lived in New Haven almost all of his twenty-six years; this January, he and his wife Jen moved into a house in a residential area on the West River, not far from his childhood home. He’s an accomplished musician, performing all over New Haven and, last fall, with Nico Segal, a frequent collaborator of Chance the Rapper. Early last year, he finished writing several tracks, including a song called “Black Parade”:
“I’m like seven minutes late for a job I hate, my boss loves Bill O’Reilly,
I wonder if he knows,
He could kiss, my, whole, ass,
Hooooole, woah, can you feel the rage?”
For Paul, these are unusually blunt lines, jarring to hear delivered in his bright, soulful baritone. They evoke the frustration he felt in his prior job working at banks in New Haven, he told me. For five years, Paul worked in lending and customer service. The atmosphere was terrible. “This shit you’re exposed to when you work in these places is the rawest form of systemic racism and oppression,” he said. “It’s like respectability politics meets bona fide racism, and it’s unapologetic.” His boss treated people of color poorly and was dismissive to clients who came to pick up their social security checks on the third of the month. Disgusted, Paul left the bank in 2016 to become a full-time musician.
In New Haven, the express purpose of Sofar Sounds is to break down the racist and classist divides Paul witnessed at the bank. The management team Paul has assembled is primarily composed of people of color, and draws upon a tight-knit community he has formed over more than two decades in the city. There’s Raven Blake, Paul’s classmate at Helene Grant Elementary School, who manages social media and emcees most shows. There’s Stephen “Gritz” King, Paul’s best friend and former classmate at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, who helps coordinate events. There’s Pete Greco, a frequent gigging partner of Paul’s over the last four years, who runs sound. So far, they’ve put on shows all over the city, at venues including an art studio, two educational nonprofits, a community theater, a bike shop, a barber shop, a backyard, and the fashion studio from this summer. At every event, Paul’s team gives away a portion of seats to make the concerts more accessible and inclusive (tickets are usually $15 online). The shows always sell out.
In keeping with the typical Sofar model, the New Haven team usually insists that audience members remain silent throughout each performance. Unless the artist exhorts the crowd to dance or sing along, the room is quiet, and all the attention is on the music. But Paul, Raven, and Gritz try to keep things light, ordering pizza and chatting up the room before the concert starts. Usually, nobody checks tickets. And everyone sits on the floor together. “We’re letting people know you’re in a random space with strangers, but at the end of the night, it’s not gonna be like that,” Gritz said. “You’re gonna feel like family.”
Paul and his team seek to promote eclectic artists like Phat A$tronaut who are representative of the city’s music community, but they’ve faced some obstacles. Under Sofar’s model, anyone can apply to perform online, and New Haven’s team has gotten inundated with submissions since the series began — lately, it’s been at least six a day, many of which come from artists based outside of New Haven. “It’s really tough to put together acts that I feel complement each other [and] are reflective of the community,” Paul said. “It’s just not what we’re going for, man. A lot of white dudes with guitars, you get a lot of folk singers … that can’t be all we do.”
To counteract this homogeneity, Paul recommended some local musicians to the Sofar Sounds Community Team. At one point, according to Raven, a spate of female artists were rejected. To ensure women were well represented at their shows, the New Haven team eventually started recruiting artists in addition to accepting submissions. And they’ve worked to make shows inviting to all, especially women and people of color. “After a show I’ll come up with a little spiel,” he said. “I’ll try to show we’re trying to do some different shit … it’s really just expressing that Sofar is for everyone.”
After talking to Paul at Anchor Spa, I biked twenty minutes from downtown New Haven out to Westville to see Phat A$tronaut up close. I met the band in a backyard shed rented from a pair of Grateful Dead devotees, friends of the guitarist, Mark, who are currently living somewhere in California. “My friend came over to my house and showed me this band. It was Hiatus Kaiyote,” Mark told me midway through the rehearsal. “I heard them and said I needed to start a new band. Spacey, but with a fat ass.”
The shed is a strange place. Half of the room is filled with musical equipment: a drum set, a keyboard stand, looping pedals. The other half is taken up by a pool table covered with tom tom heads, a cue, and empty beer bottles. The maroon walls are plastered with ephemera: a catcher’s mitt, a horseshoe, a “Thank You For Pot Smoking” bumper sticker, a California license plate, and three Grateful Dead posters. Wrapped in several sweaters (the shed was unheated), I sat amidst the musicians I had idolized that summer and watched as they played. Chad, the lanky, bespectacled singer. Mark, hunched protectively over his purple guitar. Mike, dark hair sticking out from a gray beanie, absentmindedly drifting from tamborine to woodblock to cowbell and back again. Russo, the bassist, shifting back and forth, shoulders stiff as a board. Travis, grinning at the drum set, dreads pinned by black headphones, Converse All-Stars tapping the pedals.
There was a break in the music. “Our flute player’s not here right now. He just talks about poop and farts,” Mark told me. “That’s because you laugh at everything he says,” Chad observed. So, I thought. This is where the magic happens.
The band is a mélange of distinct musical backgrounds, a counterpoint to the avalanche of acoustic strumming smothering Paul’s inbox. Chad has mostly produced progressive, R&B-influenced solo material, masterfully manipulating a type of synthesizer called a vocoder to loop, distort, and modulate the pitch and frequencies of his voice. “I was really into Jon Bellion,” Chad said. “He does this submerged vocal, this underwater sound, and I really wanted that in my music.” Mark, on the other hand, plays in five groups, including a progressive death metal band called Xenosis, whose latest album, released in January, is entitled Devour and Birth. But the group’s chemistry is apparent. “We fuckin’ have fun,” Mark said. “It makes communication easier. Like I could totally imagine Chad and I snuggling up in one sleeping bag in a tent or whatever in, I don’t know, Alaska.” Chad took to this idea. “That’s cool. Yeah, we could see the Northern Lights.” Mark turned to me. “Do you know anywhere in Alaska we could play?”
As free-spirited as they seem, the members of Phat A$tronaut practice with a keen attention to detail. During a tricky section of a new song, “Rare Fruit,” Mark and Russo played side-by-side, poring over a complex chart Mark had laid out on staff paper, to work on a series of hits, felt in an alternate time signature and laid over a shifting chord progression. Chad sat back, dazed: “I remember when hip-hop was simple.” This precision and attention manifests in their music. While rehearsing another new track called “Testify,” Chad started scatting and looping the sounds on the vocoder; the moment he switched the vocals off, Russo improvised over the same rhythm as the band transitioned into a new section.
Conventional genres fall short, so the band members call their music “space hop.” The sound is mystifying: atmospheric and drifting one moment, driving and funky the next. After over a year together, they’re working on a new album, appropriately titled Fifth Dimension. The band’s roots are all tangled up in the local music community; Chad met Paul and Mark at a D’Angelo tribute concert at Pacific Standard Tavern in New Haven. Mark asked Chad to form a band with him and some of his other friends shortly after that, and Chad later joined Paul’s Sofar team, shooting photos and video.
Now, Phat A$tronaut is trying to attract a bigger following. They’ve started to play outside of Connecticut, including one notable show at a waterpark in New Jersey (“It was a killing gig, man,” Chad said. “Waterparks are great.”) and a series of gigs in New York. Even though they still practice in a shed, the members of the band seem to be hopeful that they have a shot at something big. Or bigger, at least. “I think we have something that’s catchy, and has some reach to it,” Mark said. “I think that people of all ethnicities, and all ages, and musical tastes can appreciate what we’re doing.” Maybe one day, Phat A$tronaut will go global — if not extraterrestrial.
In New Haven, Phat A$tronaut has found a promising launching pad. Sofar is only the latest addition to an already-eclectic local music scene. According to Brian Slattery, the arts critic for the New Haven Independent, Elm City artists and venues tend to experiment with a wider range of genres, unlike in bigger cities, which tend to breed artistic specialization. Over time, the music scene has been consolidated into the heart of the city, he said; Dixwell Avenue, which runs north from downtown, used to be lined with jazz clubs, but they’ve all gone out of business, and most of the city’s dedicated hip-hop clubs have also closed down. But venues like Cafe Nine, Three Sheets, and Pacific Standard Tavern have picked up the slack, welcoming artists of all kinds. A house show scene was already buzzing before Sofar came to town. This wide range of music has, in turn, created a more open-minded fan base. “New Haven’s tolerance for weirdness is higher than it is in other places,” said Brian, who attended the first Sofar show last spring, at Lotta Studio in Westville. “Someone will take a guitar solo that’s pretty much a squall of sound and people like it.” Bars here, he continued, will book artists playing three different genres on a typical evening, and audiences won’t blink. In New Haven, Phat A$tronaut’s genre-bending sound slides in seamlessly.
Sofar has capitalized on this musical openness; at the summer show I went to, Phat A$tronaut was preceded by soul singing from Paul and acoustic covers from a guitarist. As a result, the shows have drawn audiences that are at once diverse and, through Paul’s extended web of connections, include many of the music community’s core members. The New Haven team has been keeping Sofar on the down low, letting word of mouth do most of the work in spreading the phenomenon. So while some people come out of mere curiosity, Sofar New Haven’s following is largely composed of musicians and fans who have been dedicated to the local community for years. “There are a couple gigs I’ve been to [where] it occurs to me if the building blew up, New Haven would lose a substantial part of its art scene,” Brian said. The first Sofar show? “That was one of those.”
A week after we met at Anchor Spa, Paul dropped me an invite to a small show on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving — a “Friendsgiving” show, he called it — at his own home. On Nov. 21, I drove back from my home in Boston to New Haven, wondering who I was going to hear that night.
As the evening fell, I pulled up to Paul’s place, a tan, two-story home. He greeted me at the door, wearing a white v-neck t-shirt, gray sweatpants, and blue and gray thick-striped socks. He led me upstairs to a home filled with people, none of whom I knew, and food, all of which smelled incredible — pasta and salad and cookies and some tasty-looking stuffed mushrooms, which I began to wolf down. Jen, Paul’s wife, sat in a big navy easy chair, rocking their two-month old son, Kwei-Okai, back and forth as she chatted with coworkers. Jeremiah Fuller, a pianist and friend of Paul’s since high school, messed around on the red keyboard in the corner and spoke with a local singer, Liz Dellinger, who once gave Paul voice lessons. A dozen other people chatted loudly in the dining room and kitchen, their laughter ringing around the house. Amidst it all, Paul and Pete, the Sofar sound engineer, ran around setting up amps and pedals and running cables over Oriental rugs in the living room. Fifteen minutes after I arrived, Chad walked up the stairs, toting a black ukulele case, and began to set up. Paul welcomed his guests, pointing to his right from the living room towards the kitchen: “there’s food and wine and other shit in there.” The conversation continued. And then, unannounced, Chad began scatting.
The noise died down. Chad messed with his vocoder, building up a tapestry of five looped tracks, and then he began to sing: “Pickin’ up on your vibe / You ain’t down for the lows / Only up for the highs…” Someone handed Jen a milk bottle and she held it to baby Kwei’s lips, rocking him to the music. Chad burst into a high harmonization and Paul, sweating profusely in the heat, raised his eyebrows at Jeremiah, who grinned back as the vocals soared. The song finished and the crowd broke into cheers.
Chad played a series of songs from an album he’s been working on called Love’s Letter, inspired by a two-month couchsurfing trip he took at the start of 2017, around Connecticut, up to Montreal, and all the way down to Florida. “Because I’m so appreciative to be a professional bum, you know,” he told the crowd. He closed with a song, “Something About You,” that he performed at Paul and Jen’s wedding. Paul shook his head and smiled to himself in the back of the room, while Jen, sitting in front of him, nodded back and forth. As Chad’s voice built up, in layers and layers, and crested into a wave, Paul couldn’t help but smile. After Chad finished, Paul walked to the front, asking the room, “Everybody good? Everybody drinkin’ and shit?” And then he sat at the keyboard and began to play.
In any room smaller than a club, the sheer power of Paul’s voice is overwhelming. He sang “Redemption Song,” one of his solo tracks, first, belting out, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / No one but ourselves can free our minds.” Liz’s voice floated in from the kitchen, in perfect harmony. After the opener, Paul told the room, “The songs I’m gonna play today are all written about my personal tears of identity and tears of myself.” He proceeded to blaze through a few more of his originals, and then paused. The room was silent, pensive. Finally, one of Paul’s friends, sitting on the couch, spoke up. “That’s contagious, you know that?” Jen lifted her finger up, drawing a slow circle in the air. “The whooooole room.”
Paul closed with a cover of “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” by Donny Hathaway, and then issued an apology. “Sorry for making it heavy,” he said, “but it’s important to be extremely cognizant of what’s going on in the world socially and spiritually.” He gestured toward the food, but Jen hadn’t had enough. “Do something we could all sing,” she said. Paul’s friends joined him at the front of the room, Liz on vocals, Jeremiah on keys, Pete on guitar. They played an upbeat soul medley, traveling through the decades: “What’s Going On?” by Marvin Gaye, “Just Friends” by Musiq Soulchild, and “Electric Lady,” by Janelle Monáe. I stopped taking notes, went to grab the last few stuffed mushrooms, and soaked in the scene. Gritz, leaning against the window, used a wrench as a shaker, holding it aloft and wiggling it back and forth to the beat. Paul and Liz let their voices soar in harmony. Their friends, on all sides, danced and sang along. Sofar had come home. Paul’s vision, I felt, was complete.
On February 3, Yale’s Battell Chapel was abuzz with community members and students waiting to hear activist and academic Cornel West deliver the university’s Black History Month keynote speech. But first, Paul took the mic. With Jeremiah on keys, just like in high school, he delivered a spirited rendition of the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson. Paul’s great-grandmother, born in New Haven in 1917, used to play piano at Yale events. Paul began singing at the age of three. He started listening to blues singer Donny Hathaway at five. Later, it was ballad singer Johnny Hartman. That afternoon, Paul was just carrying on tradition.
Phat A$tronaut continues to perform all over Connecticut; they’re headlining a Yale basement show on Saturday, and playing a “St. Phatty’s Day” concert at Stella Blues in mid-March. And Sofar, too, lives on. This Saturday is “Sofar New Haven: Welcome to Wakanda,” a special “Black History Edition” show. Month by month, Sofar’s web promises to grow, drawing together New Haven’s multifarious fans and musicians — with one man, and a whole lot of history, at the center of it all.
