Co-presented by the Coastal Jazz Festival, the Indian Summer Festival and Lobe Studio, Vox.Infold is a special music project that transforms enchanting vocals into an immersive sound experience with the latest sound technology.
“It is called 4D spatial sound. The studio [at Lobe] is equipped with speakers in the ceiling and under the floor. The floorboard will vibrate with sounds. Anything I listen to in that space, I just want to close my eyes, it is so mesmerizing for the ears,” says Ruby Singh, lead musician behind Vox.Infold.
A rare sound experience
Lobe Studio is one of three permanent studios in the world and the only one in North America with an integrated 4DSOUND system.
4DSOUND technology enables the production of sound holograms, thus creating an immersive sonic environment for the listener to experience spatial depth and dimensionality in all directions and from any perspective within the sound field.
Singh says the project was born out of his love for vocals and finding a space where musicians can co-create. When he brought together his favourite vocalists in B.C., such as Dawn Pemberton, Inuksuk Mckay, Russell Wallace, Tiffany Ayalik, Tiffany Moses and Shamik Bilgi, the dynamic group managed to record the piece at Western Front last year despite the obstacles caused by the pandemic.
Using traditional and emergent sonic practices to create compositions that evoke the spectrum of human emotions, the performance is a reminder that voice is an adaptation of the activity most fundamental to existence/breathing and how people are connected to their atmosphere through it.
The project expresses Singh’s long-term belief in all his works – that the underlying message is about connection.
“I would like folks to feel connected with themselves, with each other, with the natural world, with the supernatural world and with everything that is beyond our world,” he says.
A multi-disciplinary artist
Crossing the boundaries of multiple disciplines of music, poetry, visual art, photography and film, Singh’s artistic expressions usually engage with mythos, memory, identity, justice and fantasy.
“I love understanding the world through myths, and that is how my world view has come to shape. Growing up on the West Coast here that has so many great myths about the land and our relationship to the land, I found that inspiring,” he says.
Of Indian heritage, Singh is the first of his family born in Canada. Growing up with Bollywood films at home, Singh has loved creativity since he was little and got into theatre and poetry as a teen and later also found his love for photography and music.
With mixed influences, Singh says all of his projects represent different parts of him, in a world of complex identities and cross-cultural hybridity.
“I have this project, Blue God and the Serpent. We were particularly looking at the incarnation of Vishnu. Jhalaak really spoke to my love for hip-hop and poetry, and the idea of looking at these Sufi poems and see how I can interpret them through rhythm and rhyme,” Singh says.
Jhalaak was Singh’s Sufi-hip-hop project last year. It combined powerful sounds of Qawwali (devotional Sufi music from Pakistan and India) with western hip-hop and EDM.
Seeing creativity as a constantly evolving cycle, the artist keeps experimenting with new ideas. He also just released a new ambient album on June 18, Polyphonic Garden. It is an audiovisual project that was inspired by nature on the West Coast.
In addition to his artistic pursuits, Singh is also an educator, teaching music and music production in the community.
“What sustains me as an artist is that I am intertwined in the community. I am engaged and embedded and it feels great. I am extremely grateful,” he says.
Vox.Infold will run at The Lobe Studio from June 23 to July 4.
To find out more, please visit www.coastaljazz.ca
