Sara Safaie is among the two artists in ‘Purple Witch of Culver’, a music duo from Los Angeles. She recently talked to LA Weekly about the influence of Parliament-Funkadelic on her music. She said that the Parliament-Funkadelic track with the words ‘Free Your Mind’ would be true even in this world. P-Funk blew Safaie’s mind when she was a teenager. She still remembers the moment she witnessed P-Funk first perform live at Anaheim’s House of Blues. In May 2006, she was a first-year student when she went to the show with cool older children at night. She describes the experience as a high school concert band tour to Disneyland.
She had not seen a freer show than the one that featured P-Funk until then in her life. For her, it was a tribute to freedom and physical expression. The show went beyond the roof, seemingly defined all constrictions or norms, and made her dance for the first occasion as a teenager.
A saxophonist who matured during the nineties, Safaie felt she was strange but did not know how to convey her weirdness verbally. She realized that she was from another planet like P-Funk when she saw them perform with as much effort as possible.
Back then, she was permitted to make an outer space journey. She started realizing that she could become free in her existence and what she wanted, notwithstanding all the societal expectations, insincere jerks and Sir Noses around her.
Watching P-Funk perform live in Anaheim was among the first few transcendent experiences of her life. She mostly recalls a feeling of power and total freedom. The ethos and energy of P-Funk lit her up. Get Off Your Ass and Jam turned into a mantra, she said, and she joined the hive mind, grooving with no regard to why or how.
After the show, she found all the Parliament-Funkadelic records available on the market, including the album ‘Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome’. She started to wear colorful skirts that she found as used products when she essentially cultivated an identity while disregarding every stock identity usually associated with a high-schooler. Her classmates started to describe her as a funky student. As a strange half-Persian teenager, she no longer needed to bother about what others thought about her nose because she was funky.
She had that first wave realization more because of the Parliament-Funkadelic team and their message than anything else. As for Safaie, funk music means the sterile and clinical monochromatic thing that causes us to forget who we are and the truth.
She met musician Evan Taylor as she moved to Los Angeles years after the P-Funk show. Initially, she did not know how funky Taylor was. It took her a while to realize that Taylor was the erstwhile drummer, production partner, and music director for Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic.
Back then, she realized that her life had come full circle after she met a person with a knack for funk music. The collaboration of Safaie and Taylor started with an approach to recording that she described as one-take-to-tape as well as continued with the same experimental spirit. They look to capture the energy and sound at the point of origin. The collaborators do not buy into any boxed concept of how everything should be; they expect that it would come across in their creations.
