COIN COIN Chapter Three: river run thee Matana Roberts

"Something of a one-woman opera, these 12 tracks plow through harsh noise passages and spring into sudden refrains, drift through halcyon field recordings and float through harrowing spoken-word passages... Late into 'river run thee', during one of the album’s more placid moments, Roberts declares, "I like to tell stories." The admission might suggest an easy key to the world that Roberts is building with COIN COIN. But it seems too reductive, really, not unlike calling her a mere musician. She collects stories, analyzes them, and then transmogrifies them, aggregating bits of material until anecdotes become open-ended, elliptical histories. Roberts knows that any story, just like jazz, is only an initial approach to something much more broad and important. Three albums into COIN COIN, it’s now clear that Roberts isn’t just a storyteller, musician, ethnographer, historian, bandleader, arranger, improviser, or activist. She plays all of those roles, yes; collectively, they power one of the most provocative ongoing bodies of work by any American musician." – Pitchfork, 8.2

"Part three of Matana Roberts' ongoing Coin Coin series sees her reaching new heights of troubling majesty. Or rather, new depths, given the churning, oceanic feel that underlies these multilayered tales of slavery, courage, tradition, history and counter-history. The first two chapters in the series fell somewhere between, above and below free jazz. Her 'panoramic sound quilting', as she describes her method, created historical narratives with multiple instrumentalists, operatic incursions and the persistent reminder of musical and historical debts. But this third chapter sees Roberts in solitary, vocal-heavy mode, without an ensemble but producing looped music such sustained complexity it's like a host of angels (or demons) attempting to express the entire history of everything all at once." – The Wire

"river run thee is an extraordinary sonic collage, constructed from loops, field recordings and live overdubs. As to whether this is jazz or not, who cares? What matters is the music - and it is remarkable, weaving together saxophone improv, folk fragments, poetry, accounts of the slave trade and personal testimonies in an approach she calls 'panoramic sound quilting'. Working from an elaborate graphic score that incorporates photographs, archival texts and musical notation, Roberts layers her own sung and spoken vocals, saxophone and electronics into a rhizomatic work that disrupts linear narratives and maps points across time. Yet for all its openness of form, river run thee is not some amorphous piece of sound art. It's a deeply compelling work, with a true sense of momentum... An astonishing work of history, memory and sensed experience, river run thee confirms Roberts' place as one of the most important living artists in any field." – The Quietus

"river run thee ups the ante in Roberts' project. It is initially elliptical, but its self-determination, unflinching courage, and intense focus and openness create an indefinable but living, breathing art." – All Music Guide