- I don't know if you would describe it as like electronic music or whatever that you incorporate into your pow wow singing.

- In my travels, even just sitting by a person on the plane, I, you know, well "What are you going here for?"

I'm like, well, "I'm a musician, I'm traveling, I'm an artist."

"What do you do?"

And then it's steps by step and it's like, I don't know how to explain what we created.

It's only for there to you experience.

♪ Pow wow vocables - He's creating his own genre of music almost.

He too is presenting our culture in a more modern medium, maybe bringing other people into our world a little bit and appreciating our people and our culture and giving us some visibility.

You know, on top of that, he's been making a name for himself pretty quickly.

- The way that I would explain to someone who may have not have heard something like this before is this is very just on its own.

Pow wow music is, is probably the closest that you will get to it.

But if you ask a pow wow singer they will say that this is not pow wow music.

This is, you know something experimental or, something different.

But I feel like this is my version of a one man pow wow or hand drum CD.

For many years indigenous music voices haven't been out here as much.

You know, I don't mean any harm towards your ears.

It's meant to cut through live and it's meant to be loud.

It's meant to be in your face.

It's meant to, hit you over the knuckles with the ruler.

♪ Pow wow vocables The drum group I was a part of, and we were invited to a music festival curator by Justin Vernon and the Bon Iver family, and was with our friend Andrew Broder.

During his set, one of the dancers, he just went out there and just started dancing, like how he would at a pow wow.

And in my mind, if you ripped what Broder was doing, and he put some pow wow singing underneath Reuben, it would've been a flawless transition.

Now, I didn't think of like, "Oh, I gotta go make an album".

(laughs) like that, it just was like post it note kind of like stuck in the back of my head type of thing.

- I seen you in the green room down at 7th St.

Entry and you had all these different tapes and I was like reading some of the labels of like pow wows from the early 2000s and the '90s.

I'm like, this dude's crazy with it.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, getting into the history of it.

- Yeah, I really just didn't think about what I've recorded until maybe I was trying to compile things for samples for the album.

Like I knew like, yeah, I'm recording all the time.

Like, but that's just regular for me, it's like breathing.

Most of the samples that you hear are from pow wows and from my recordings themselves spanning back to 1992.

It's also just real life instances that I have with my friends that I record.

The samples that you hear were are very close to me, and they're very important.

Each voice that you hear.

And I wanted to pay homage to some of my late drum brothers with putting their voices or the songs that were made for them on the album just because, this was a release of grieving emotions that I had kind of built up that I just didn't have the the place or space to kind of set that stuff free.

♪ Pow wow vocables Archiving and keeping a record of pow wow singing is important to me, because I feel like there hasn't been that type of platform for anyone to really take care of or curate this body of work that's been here and been recorded for 50 years plus.

Now that I'm stepping into an industry that isn't represented well by indigenous artists and let alone pow wow singers.

I just feel like there's a need to be the steward of pow wow music and just really take care of the garden that is pow wow music.

♪ Pow wow vocables Pow wow recording and pow wow singing has always been a part of my life, and I'm really super proud of of being able to be taught, especially, in the projects and in the place where, some lots of things are, what it is there, but, some good things came from the PJs man and, I'm proud of the people who I met when I was younger, who took the time.

Try to wrangle up some rambunctious city kids and try to, teach 'em some discipline around the drum.

♪ Pow wow vocables (haunting music)