MUSIC

MUSIC Ruby Singh’s deep artistry heats up Indian Summer

by Steve Newton

Ruby Singh is a musician, poet, visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. According to his website, “his expressions engage with mythos, memory, identity, justice and fantasy; where the surreal can shatter the boundaries of the real.”

He unleashes a hearty laugh when asked to explain just what that all means.

“All those subjects are kind of the impulse behind creating a lot of my art,” Singh says on the line from his home near Commercial Drive. “Whether engaging in the idea of myth or looking at the world as mythic—or mystic, even—so that is a perspective that I essentially just come from, because it’s embedded inside of me to view and have a relationship with the world that way.

“And then memory, for me, is a lot around what invokes a sense of nostalgia, what for me feels like it can hold a place for that which we remember in our human bodies, but how we can also open up the memory of most of the more-than-human world—which kinda relates to the fantasy edge of things as well. And identity and justice: growing up in the world that I’ve grown up in, those are two things that have been embedded in me, in looking at how our various different identities intersect, where marginalization lives, and where marginalization needs to be shattered.”

Vancouverites wanting to see for themselves what Singh’s art is all about have two options at this year’s Indian Summer Festival, which runs from June 17 to July 17. An online event titled Ancient Futures—Musical Inheritances, running from July 8 to 17, brings the premiere of a short documentary about his 2020 album, Jhalaak (pronounced “ja-luck”), which is a fusion of traditional Sufi music with rap rhyming and EDM beats. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Singh, Inuit throat-singing duo PIQSIQ (pronounced “pilk-silk”), and local musician Khari Wendell McClelland.

The other Indian Summer Festival event Singh is involved with is Vox.Infold, an inperson installation that runs from June 23 to July 4 at Lobe Studio on East Hastings.

“This is like one of the most incredible auditory spaces I’ve ever been in,” he raves. “And what the space is, is essentially they have speakers placed all around the room, and you can direct the sound in and around those speakers, and you create like a spatial ambisonic sound. So it’s gonna be one bubble of listeners at a time entering the space and having a chance to listen to it in this 4-D sound. The music will feel like singers are dancing around you with their voices, which I’m really ecstatic about.”

Singh—who likes to listen to everything from 1940s Bollywood to Bulgarian women’s

Ruby Singh is elated about his Indian Summer fest shows. Photo by Kristine Cofsky.

choirs to Robert Johnson in his spare time— is also thrilled about the “powerhouse musicians” that will join him for Vox.Infold. Those include vocalists Dawn Pemberton, Russell Wallace, Tiffany Kuliktana Ayalik and Kayley Inuksuk Mackay (the sisters from PIQSIQ), Tiffany Moses, and Shamik Bilgi.

“It is made up of all racialized folks, from the Black, Indigenous, and POC community,” Singh notes. “One of the intentions behind it was to create a space where we could kind of bring our voices and our creativity without the idea of essentially how you can feel restricted in some white-dominated places. We wanted to open up a space where we could follow our impulses.”

Singh has called Vancouver home for many years. So given that he’s living on unceded territory, what impact has colonialism had on how he approaches his art?

“Wow,” he replies, “that’s a huge question. I love it. Well, I am creating art in a colonial context, right. There’s no way around that, ‘cause it’s everywhere. You know, it’s written on my passport. I definitely hold a lot of privilege as a settler creating music and art on these traditional stolen lands, so I hold that to be true. And through my art I try to invoke a decolonial process, where we are focused on process and not just the product. So those would be the two things I would mainly think of, but it’s a pretty deep question. I feel like I could talk about that for a long time.” g

Indian Summer Festival takes place from June 17 to July 17. For more information, visit IndianSummerFest.ca.

TM