About.

THE GRIOT is a sixteen-record album told in music, illustrations, and the spaces between them. Think of the booklet that once lived inside an album sleeve—something to study while the record played. This one keeps opening.

The keeper of the record.

The Griot listens, remembers, observes, and occasionally implicates himself. He is a storyteller with a historian’s appetite, an unreasonable number of questions, and a sense of humor that does not always behave.

Belonging. Classification. Power. The distance between the official version and the lived one. These things move through the songs without asking to be introduced.

Three threads. One record.

Sixteen chapters carry intersecting stories. Some move across places and years. Some keep returning to the question of who gets to be considered ordinary. Others appear first as an aside, a grin, a detail at the edge of a photograph. The threads are meant to be discovered, not diagrammed.

The artwork is not decoration for the music. Each chapter’s permanent illustrated panels add another account of events. Sometimes an image confirms the song. Sometimes it quietly disagrees.

MUSIATA.

MUSIATA is an independent artist, songwriter, and storyteller. Southern Africa, Manchester, and St. Louis all leave their fingerprints here, alongside wit, invention, political observation, and the peculiar things memory chooses to keep.

Start with the first chapter, or enter wherever curiosity takes you. Play the record. Read the margins. Look at the pictures a second time. The account may have changed while you were listening.