The second album by Mike Reed’s Separatist Party and its first with Thrill Jockey, Sing the Color Blue, is a recording born from numerous sessions, showcasing perseverance and a capacity for transformation. The album brings together Mike Reed with Rob Frye, Cooper Crain, Dan Quinlivan (all members of the trio Bitchin Bajas), Marvin Tate, and Ben LaMar Gay, in a collective oscillating between composition, reconstruction, improvisation, and song structure. The atypical duration and form of its creation contribute to the uniqueness of Sing the Color Blue. Elements of the album date back nearly a decade, starting in January 2022 at the Constellation studio in Chicago, with most of the recording taking place between November 2023 and April 2024 at Electrical Audio studio. The album was built gradually, with Reed constantly reworking the pieces until their final structure revealed itself. The album "Sing the Color Blue" includes a cover of "Restless in Pieces" by avant-garde cellist Tristan Honsinger and an arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow's Study for Mechanical Piano No. 6, thus establishing a dialogue between two very different yet equally iconoclastic minds. Elsewhere, the vocal work is handled with remarkable flexibility. “During the sessions for this album, we explored many vocal elements. When I couldn't find the right direction, I would return to those previous sessions to draw new sources of inspiration.” Reed reassembled fragments of lyrics and performances from Tate into new lyrical structures, often completely altering the original meaning, and sometimes even provided Tate with melodic lines to sing over or within this material. The result is an album where parentage seems multiple rather than unique: the songs emerge simultaneously from live interaction, archival research, editing, rearranging, and recomposition. The title "Sing the Color Blue" also reflects this spirit of transformation. Reed explained that the expression partly came from a friend's critique of his almost entirely blue wardrobe and his long-standing attraction to Bauhaus aesthetics.