Ruby Singh

Artist in Residence

Artist, MOTHER CLOUD Festival | February 2024

Ruby Singh is a multi award winning composer and producer residing on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver BC.).

His creativity crosses the boundaries of music, poetry, photography and film engaging with mythos, memory, justice and fantasy. Singh is an artist whose work is informed by sounds found all around us, from the whirling planets and stars of distant galaxies to percussion of an umbrella under coastal rains, to the perpetual moving birdsong of the dawn chorus, constantly circling the globe. The richly imaginative visual textures to his sound design have found kinship in the theatre, film and dance worlds, where he has been celebrated by multiple Jessie and Leo award nominations. His distinct approach uses traditional and emergent sonic practices to create compositions that express the vast spectrum of the human experience.

Singh’s artistic impulses gravitate in many directions. In 2022, he received the Lieutenant

Governor’s Jubilee Award for excellence in art and music. His previous works range from ambient audio-visual worlds of the Polyphonic Garden, to Jhalaak, a Sufi hip hop album made alongside Manganiyar musicians recorded in the clay huts of the Thar desert in Rajasthan India and reinterpreting 13th century Sufi poetry. His most recent offerings include: Vox.infold, a highly acclaimed acapella project bringing together the sounds of Inuit, Indigenous, Black and South Asian voices, and The Future Ancestors, a blues and soul infused live hip hop project. Singh believes in art’s ability to reimagine futures, and its ability to repurpose aesthetic freedoms toward civil and environmental justice.

rubysingh.ca

Vox.Infold

Juno Award Nominated 2023

Ruby Singh presents Vox.Infold: a powerhouse vocal ensemble based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlí̓ lwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver BC). This dynamic squad uses traditional and emergent sonic

practices to create compositions that express the vast spectrum of the human experience. They remind us that the voice is an adaptation of the metabolic activity most crucial to our existence – breathing, this is how the atmosphere enters our beings. Evoking

loneliness, joy, the mysterious and supernatural, Vox.Infold brings together musical luminaries, Dawn Pemberton, Inuksuk Mckay, Russell Wallace, Tiffany Ayalik, Tiffany Moses, Shamik Bilgi and Ruby Singh.

Hear about the Vox.Infold process in this interview!

Polyphonic Garden

The album was built and shaped using field recordings captured on the beautiful west coast of Turtle Island. Ruby also used plantwave technology to convert electrical data from plants and fungi into midi, Uno, Arutria & Micrologue synths, and analogue delay pedals. It's a 5 part audio/visual series aligned with the solar cycle. It began on last year's winter solstice, and will continue forward until this year's winter solstice.

"This suite was created to be a source of reflection, respice and rejuvenation. Reflecting on our relationships and connection with ourselves, each other and the more than human world. Rejuvenating a sense of wonder for the natural world and how we might be able to move into right relations with the lands, waters and sky that nurture us.

Ancestral remedies
Spacious ceremony
Medicine for the stone
Broken claims of mystic noise

Walk lightly on the earth
Enter the ritual of relation
Transformative potentiality
Liberate the flesh for the realm of spirit

Ingest these transcendent tinctures
Of the Polyphonic Garden
And behold
And be held"

-Ruby Singh

Created with support from Canada Council of the Arts.