By NANCY WILLEY
Staff writer
The Holland Sentinel
Thursday, August 19, 1999

A first CD by a former Hope College student defies description.

Sufjan Stevens released “A Sun Came” earlier this year. On it, he sings and plays the wide variety of instruments featured, including electric and acoustic guitars, oboe, recorder, wood flute, bass, drums, sitar and banjo.

And many of the lyrics, all written by Stevens, are adapted from literary or biblical sources.

“My impetus is to create music that defies categorization,” said Stevens from his home in New York City. “Every track suggests one sound, and then the next track subverts that with another sound.”

When pushed for a description, he settles for “eclectic pop,” or possibly “baroque rock.”

Stevens, who grew up in Petoskey, is best known in West Michigan for his membership in the folk band, Marzuki, which played in coffee houses and bars in the area before breaking up.

Stevens, 23, said that he recorded most of the 18 tracks on “A Sun Came” on a four-track recorder, and then mixed and engineered the sounds last summer using a Macintosh Pro-Tools system at Hope College.

“It’s a very organic sounding CD, but it’s all done on the computer,” Stevens said. “When you listen to the songs, the last word you’re going to think of is computer.”

The CD was produced locally by Stevens at Asthmatic Kitty Records in Macatawa, a new, small-scale recording operation set up by local resident Lowell Brams in order to collaborate with local musicians.

His intention is to produce “progressive, unconventional music whose work crosses genres,” Brams said. “Most of the people we know and talk to don’t think there’s enough interesting music around — music that is really alternative.”

Brams describes Stevens’ music as “melodic, dissonant, playful and satirical, drawing on varied influences from European folk music to Middle Eastern melodies to simple rock backbeats.” (Or “Nick Drake meets Frank Zappa.”)

“I think he’s extremely talented,” said Brams, who is related to Stevens through his former marriage to Stevens’ mother. “I’ve been hearing his music for many, many years and it’s clear to me that he’s an uncommonly gifted songwriter and has a great talent for conceptualizing music.”

Stevens graduated from Hope last year with a degree in English literature. He now works as a promotional designer for book publisher Penguin Putnam, Inc. in New York City and is studying for his master’s degree in fiction writing.

He is also working on another album.

And no, he didn’t make up his first name for artistic purposes. The name Sufjan, Stevens explained, was given him at birth by the leader of a cult his parents were then members of (in their “weird phase,” as he calls it). His older brother is named Marzuki, which Stevens and fellow musicians adopted for the name of their former band.

And while on the subject of names there actually exists a cat that inspired the name Asthmatic Kitty Records. The feline, owned by Brams, is named Sara, and it does have asthma.

“We were searching for a name that hadn’t been used. We figured that (Asthmatic Kitty) was probably one of the them,” Brams said.

“A Sun Came” is available at Jacob’s Ladder in Holland, Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Kentwood, and Schuler’s Books & Music in Grand Rapids.