Photo Credit: Copperqueen Records
This Friday (10/4), British-Nigerian musician, filmmaker, and visual artist SIRA* (Zina Saro-Wiwa) will release her highly anticipated debut album, Songs for the End of the World. The project is a carefully curated collection of songs that serve as an outlet for Zina’s deep emotions about her favorite topic: the apocalypse. The result is a toolkit of eclectic and upbeat tracks that show us how to survive and thrive in the hardest of times. Her music has earned support from outlets like FLOOD Magazine, Bandcamp, who included “Good Thing” in their Bandcamp Weekly playlist, Riff Magazine, and many others.
To get a final taste of the project, today SIRA* shared the album’s focus track, “Homecoming.” The song features electronic jazz pioneer Mark de Clive-Lowe, who brings a flurry of solo keys and synth to the sonically surreal dance track. “Homecoming” awakens with SIRA*’s radiant vocals, as an array of percussion instruments and layered backing vocals float before the song unravels into a euphoric, African-inspired groover.
“Homecoming” is a meditation on what it means to return to where you were born, even if you never ended up living there. SIRA* says, “This song is a welcome song, but one that asks questions about the return.” The track is based on a recording by SIRA* of her all-women’s masquerade and singing group in Nigeria called Sira Ogbo. The women in this group – the majority of whom are farmers – are singing in the Ogoni language, “Who will help us? If you are rich, everybody wants to know you. If you are poor, nobody wants to know you. Who will help us?” The idea of wanting to come home and feel held but coming up against people’s need for you to help them is common in people that visit home countries that are in more precarious financial positions. So home does not mean rest and being taken care of. It often means you are being required to help others.
SIRA* continues, “My life has been so enriched by dedicating my artwork and career to the Niger Delta where I was born. Despite the fact of my father’s execution and the slow demise of my immediate family, I can only love this place. It is my root. And by learning to love it you discover that this is a place that is rich in lore, ecology, ideas, spirituality, culture, and so much more. I have only ever felt generosity and have learned so much. So the rejoinder I personally added to the singing was ‘I toge ke itorn dum do eh eh,‘ which means, ‘We will show you how to live’. But the very last lines sung in the track ‘Am I home? Coming home…’ leaves the question in the air, somehow. The idea of home is something one is always working through on a daily basis. At least for me.”
Zina will also be participating in this weekend’s Atlanta Art Week event at SITE this Saturday, October 5 from 5:00-11:00pm. The event will be a monumental evening of art installations, live performances, exhibitions, and open studios all in one expansive event. SIRA* will be participating in the installation the end is near, the end is beginning, a compilation of presentations of video art by women artists of African descent. Visually and sonically immersive, haunting and spiritual, the films will be projected onto the ruins of a 19th-century industrial complex and feature reflections on death and rebirth, endings and beginnings, collapse and revolution. During the installation, Zina will debut several new works from her upcoming new album, including her first endeavor in animation. RSVP to the event here.
Listen / Share: “Homecoming
”SIRA* wants to talk about the apocalypse. She’s prepared to tackle the weight of such a controversial topic, because she’s already spent so much time doing it. The collection of songs on her new album Songs for the End of the World serve as eclectic, alternative, African-inspired spirituals for the post apocalyptic age, or “Yorpiataa” — which means “otherworldly” in the Ogoni language. It is used to describe music that seems to come from a place that is not human. SIRA*’s sound could be compared to that of early Björk, or if Fleet Foxes were born in Africa, or the Brazilian supergroup Fourth World, or an Afro-Brazilian Massive Attack. It’s safe to say that her music surpases all genres and sounds, fitting right into its own eclectic category.
Composed, arranged and sung entirely by SIRA*, the album features heavyweight musicians such as Mark de Clive-Lowe and it includes a contribution from the superstar Australian aboriginal writer and academic Tyson Yunkaporta. The project also contains remixed field recordings from her art making in Ogoniland from the last 11 years. The timing for this album couldn’t be better. SIRA* is the musical alter-ego of visual artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa and is a proud member of the Ogoni, indigenous people of the Niger Delta region. Her father was Ken Saro-Wiwa, a writer and human rights activist executed by the Nigerian military government in 1995 for leading peaceful protests against Shell Oil and its environmental and economic denigration of Ogoniland.
“My art life has been a way of taking hold of that legacy and transforming the pain into something powerful and beautiful,” she says. “But I’ve been singing and composing since the age of four. And whilst art has been good for trying to manage the psychological and political fallout from my father’s death, music is actively healing my heart in a deeper way. It is a return to my truest self. The lynch pin to all my creative outputs.”
Though born in Nigeria, SIRA* was brought up in the UK and during this time, drew inspiration from Impressionist composers including Satie, Chopin and Ravel. She has sung in choirs throughout her youth. Her style evolved rapidly after she became obsessed with Brazilian music and she traveled to Bahia in Brazil multiple times by herself from the tender age of 19. She wrote for legendary underground music magazine Straight No Chaserand was immersed in world music, jazz and the underground electronic scene in the mid-to-late 90s. In 2009, she relocated to New York City from London and began her art practice, eventually moving out to Los Angeles before her recent decision to return to Port Harcourt, Nigeria and purchase a farm. Songs for the End of the Worldchannels elements from all these places, but SIRA* also draws on energy from beyond our material plane. SIRA* speaks enthusiastically of animist traditions and unseen “little people” in different cultures, including the Kachina spirits of Hopi folklore. “I live in a liminal space, with one foot in the spiritual world.”
Outside of her blooming music career, SIRA* is a revered artist. Her multi-disciplinary, research-based practice deals primarily with environmentalism, invisible ecologies, re-imagining indigeneity and exploring the nature of power. She works with video, photography, sound, distillation, food, performance lecture and institution-building to tell stories and share research and meditation findings. SIRA* is a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Art and a TORCH visiting Fellow at Oxford University and her art works are collected in museums including MoMA and The Smithsonian. She has lectured on her practice and ideas at Yale, UCLA, Oxford University amongst many other institutions.
Songs For the End of the World Tracklist:
1. Cosmic Shebeen
2. Homecoming ft. Mark de Clive-Lowe
3. Time Is Not Enough
4. Gbenebeka Rising
5. Good Thing (Lenu Naa Bor Yor Me Ep)
6. Eye of the Shebeen
7. I Dream of Deluge
8. Everybody Needs Salt (a Yarn by Tyson Yunkaporta)
‘Songs for the End of the World’ Album Art
