Zaki Ibrahim sends messages from outer space on new album
Local soul singer found inspiration in the skies for wide-ranging project The Secret Life of Planets
The currents of the universe brought Zaki Ibrahim to where she is at this moment. The currents of the universe will take Zaki Ibrahim wherever she’s supposed to go next. Nearly six years on from the release of her Polaris Music Prize shortlisted debut, Every Opposite, in 2012, the Toronto-via-Nanaimo (and occasionally Cape Town) electro-soul chanteuse finally released her second full-length, The Secret Life of Planets, on Jan. 31 — specifically timed, as befits a record preoccupied with cosmic rhythms and humanity’s speck-like position within them, to coincide with a total lunar eclipse and the appearance for a night of a “super-blue blood moon” in the skies over the wee chunk of orbital rock we call home.
There was a low-key, sold-out, small-venue hometown release gig at the Rivoli on Feb. 2, to be followed by a date at South Africa’s Design Indaba festival in the soon-to-be-waterless Cape Town later this month and, she hopes, a run of shows at planetariums hither and thither “in as many cities as I can,” akin to the one she did at the University of Toronto to fête the release of her 2016 EP, ORBIT: A Postcoital Prequel.
Other than that, however, she’s in no rush to start hustling the thing. Time is, as any enthusiastic amateur student of astrophysics like Ibrahim can tell you, malleable and even sort of meaningless on the universal scale, after all. Why not let the album breathe and find its own way?
That was basically the way Ibrahim and her close collaborators, gifted electronic producer Alister Johnson and limber multi-instrumentalist Casey MQ, let The Secret Life of Planets happen in the first place. No deadlines, no pressure and no strict design beyond the self-imposed restriction to keep all the gear analog and keep a general mindfulness of aligning the real work days to lunar cycles and other “activity in outer space.”
“We decided, going into it, that we were going to take our time with it,” Ibrahim says over a glass of red wine in the east end. “We weren’t going to put a deadline on it, we were going to do all sorts of other projects of our own and that kind of thing, but this special project, we were going to delve into and put whatever we needed to put into it.”
As with most things Zaki, The Secret Life of Planets is a brainy affair, drawing some sonic inspiration from the captivating “sounds” transmitted by different planets in our solar system and beyond in the form of radioactive emissions and a finding a background thematic thrust in “the mysticism of sound and the idea of tone carrying meaning, carrying information” and the theoretical ability of sound and vibration to bend time and even “transport you to another dimension.” It’s also the cathartic product of some pretty heavy life-and-death experiences, Ibrahim having lost her father and subsequently given birth to a son within a fourmonth period in 2014.
All that said, The Secret Life of Planets is a highly approachable piece of work — one that “went in a completely different direction than we thought we were going to go in” after initial dreams of making a deep, freaky jazz odyssey in the Sun Ra/ Miles Davis vein metamorphosed into a comparatively lighthearted tour through warm, retro-futuristic, analog-toned R&B, disco, electro and house. “Equal magic, equal science” is how Ibrahim characterizes the results.
“I was finally, like, ‘You know what? Light is deep,’ ” she shrugs. “The simple melodies — those guilty pleasures that pop borrows from, those melodies that are uplifting and almost nostalgic — they’re accessible, but they still carry the information. So it’s not a ‘wallowing’ record, although there are moments that touch and honour certain depths, I think.
“There was some humour. We definitely laughed a lot. Maybe it was just kind of like when you snap and you just start laughing and you can’t stop — there was a lot of that. But I would make that decision to be light with the content and also real with it.”
Like Every Opposite, which landed on the 2013 Polaris short list seemingly out of nowhere and free of hype precisely because so many jurors believed it should be heard by a wider audience, The Secret Life of Planets is probably too good to pass unnoticed, however casual Ibrahim is flying with the release.
She knows it’s good, too, and admits that “at this stage, I can see where a label could step in and, like, give it some legs.” But she’s not going to force the issue.
“I kinda want to meet someone who wants to partner or something and I’m not in a rush,” says Ibrahim. “What’s the plan? The plan is things are gonna happen in time.
“The album is about non-linear timelines. It’s about spiralling time, it’s about overlapping time, it’s about all these concepts, and I’m not going to play by the rules. I’m going to put it out and I’m going to work hard. I’m sensitive, though. I’m still really, really sensitive — maybe more than ever, because of the work put in, because of the years, because of the information in the tones that’s there. I don’t just want to fling it out and not have some guidance around it or not present it in certain ways. But for now, I’m gonna put it out, have a little ceremony and then do cool s--- around it.”