SIRA*’s eclectic album, Songs for the End of the World is commentary on the eventuality of the anthropocene. While T.S Elliot posits an underwhelming end to our existence, Sira’s hypothesis brushes aside the why’s of the apocalypse and invites all to immerse themselves in the moment. At its essence, Songs for the End of the World is primal, seeking to attach itself to the subconscious. It relies on local drums for persistent bursts against inertia, pianos are overlaid to communicate ideas and dictate whatever mood, or topic she chooses to address. The project is generous with its length; SIRA* is unafraid of long stretches of silence to build suspense, chants that evoke moments of spiritual procession, and when she sings, her wide vocals bellow with a larger than life feel reminiscent of Bondian music.
SIRA* isn’t a stranger to taking on the ‘big ideas’ that explore the human condition. Her father was Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian writer and activist who was executed for protests during the military era. Saro-Wiwa hovers above Nigeria’s struggles against government jackboots as a martyr. SIRA*’s protests on the other hand are much subtler yet, as striking; her messages are dispersed across disciplines in art. SIRA* is prolific both as a visual artist and curator with numerous exhibitions under her real name, Zina Saro-Wiwa.
Zina’s artistic projects, which sometimes yield products, tap into her Niger Delta roots to provide greater understanding of human concepts– spiritual and otherwise. She packages Ogogoro (West African Moonshine) as a metaphor for the dismissed and undervalued Niger Delta region that has been cursed by oil. Zina once examined man’s insistence on self determination in Table Manners, a long running project where different people consume a meal in front of a camera. An offset of the series, Table Manners: Bush Tales involves an unnamed man eating a tortoise, in the artist statement, Zina states this project “acts as a meditation on eco-psychologies and the psychic relationship between man and beast.”
SIRA*’s newest release, Songs for the End of the World follows her line of art projects steeped in Niger Delta culture and belief. She blends this with European house music, trip hop, electronic music and exotic sounds drawn from areas around the world and within. These elements come together to create a compelling music experience. The Blotted wants to know more.
The Blotted: What was growing up like? Was that when you learnt to play instruments?
SIRA*: I grew up in the UK and I started learning to play the piano at a very young age. Maybe around 5 or 6 years old. I was always making up little songs and I remember once I wrote a descant for a spiritual called Jordan River at our primary school. 4 of us in our choir sung the descant part I wrote in front of morning assembly. An early highlight of my career! Meanwhile at home my older brothers would play us music like Bread, the Beatles, lots of heavy metal, Johnny Mathis, Peter Cetera and Pavarotti. Really odd mix. We also loved pop music like Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson of course, Madonna, Culture Club and Cher. (Cher’s 1987 rock album is everything). I was immersed in classical music as a teenager, I took up the viola and I did music and GCSE level and A-level also. Pop music was amazing then too. We had K.D Lang, Tanita Tikaram, Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, Sinead O’Connor. I got seriously turned on to Brazilian music in a major way from the age of 15/16 onwards. And I also started getting into very strange alternative music that I would find on odd radio stations. I remember this terrifying and haunting track called Hamburger Lady that I put on one of my mixtapes. I’ve always been open to truly experimental and sometimes dark work.
The Blotted: When did you start working on this project?
SIRA*: I started and released “Cosmic Shebeen” in 2023. At the time I did not know I would end up making an album. I thought I was making an EP of three songs that I would release in Spring of 2024. But then new songs kept erupting out of me in 2024 and the encompassing theme of the apocalypse – which is what this album is about – emerged then too. The summer of 2024 saw a huge spurt in the development of this album. But “Time is Not Enough” and “I Dream of Deluge” are songs that began in 2022 but they found themselves in 2024. And the project keeps growing. It’s not done yet. It’s not just an album, it’s a visual album that has a performance lecture attached to it that I am currently touring. There are music videos but also video installation works attached to the project. Photography, limited edition vinyl. Ultimately, I want it to live as an immersive video piece that explores the idea of Apocalypse in an expanded way. I am just letting it be what it needs to be.
The Blotted: Before this interview, I went through a lot of your other works and a common theme remains your concerted effort to bring different parts of Niger Delta to the larger world. My question is, what world is ending, is it our world as Nigerians or everyone’s?
SIRA*: Great question. I think what I am doing in this album is complicating this idea of The Apocalypse and the end of the world. There are many worlds and many kinds of apocalypses taking place every day. And also, every ending implies a beginning too. I will say that there is a very real climate crisis that is and will continue to affect us all in the coming years in radical ways. And I do see us bumping up at the limits of this current global political and economic system. A shift is underway. Americans are dealing with the limits of a post capitalist society and severe existential challenges to their democracy so are thinking about the end times right now a lot it seems. But having this conversation in, say, Nigeria is a different story. Many developing countries don’t concern themselves with apocalypse as a grand overarching idea as there is enough daily trauma to deal with (I’ve concluded this from a very unscientific survey mind you…)
The Blotted: There is a tinge of existentialism present within this body of work, dare I say Nihilism when we look at your genres of choice— where was your headspace when you created this project?
SIRA*: Just a tinge? LOL. I am hugely existential it’s true, but I don’t think I am nihilistic just because I am interested in the idea of the end of the world. I am still joyful and I try to promote joy as a strategy. The performance lecture I have developed around the album is called The Joy Apocalypse, and half the songs on this album are upbeat dance tracks. But in answer to your question, my head is where it always is: managing grief and bereavement, laughing constantly because of memes most likely, delighting at the smallest things and getting enraged at others, thinking about what I am going to eat, inventing new dishes and cocktails, reading, worrying about my health, making more music. I feel all the things all the time. This is just me. It also feels logical and natural for an inquiring mind to think about the apocalypse and where our world is headed.
The Blotted: In one of your artist statements, you mentioned coming back to Nigeria in 2013, how was that experience, and did that play a part in putting together this project?
SIRA*: Yes, I moved back to Port Harcourt to make a few bodies of art work for museum shows in 2013 and I was there for nearly three years. A lot of the field recordings you hear in my album come from that time and all my trips there since then. The flute in “Cosmic Shebeen,” for example, is a snippet of a rehearsal of ours in 2014. “Gbenebeka Rising” contains recordings from over the last ten years. Getting more deeply involved in my village and in my indigenous culture has perfumed and transformed my music making. It’s made it a thousand times more interesting and potent. I love deep Nigerian music. It’s so beautiful and wonderfully weird. The singing styles, the layered percussion, the choruses. It’s so complex. Our religious music is stunning. Ogoniland and Nigeria generally is a very mesmerizing place sonically… African sound magic is where it’s at. And integrating these codes into my music practice has made it much stronger.
The album begins with a wailing performance with the Oja flute. An invitation, a call to action, if you may– for all to be immersed in the exciting possibility that the world is ending. The intro song is titled Cosmic Shebeen. Shebeen means somewhere unlicensed or illicit where alcohol is sold, where people get to indulge in themselves and separate woe from waking life. The concept of apocalypse and the world ending has always been romanticised. However, the existential dread that looms in the information age has brought apocalypse nearer. Something is always happening somewhere. It raises a number of questions.
Are we next? Where and when do we panic? When do we despair, if we ever would? And if we don’t despair and take this one opportunity to truly indulge in the moment and take risks, knowing that tomorrow might never come. Stanley Kramer’s 1959 movie, On the Beach which was based on Nevil Shute’s book of eponymous name explored a fictitious Australia where the world’s Northern hemisphere had been decimated by nuclear weapons. The remaining surviving population in Australia wake up each day waiting for the winds to blow radioactive waste in their direction and wipe them out as well. Without the overarching narrative of apocalypse, ‘On the Beach’ is almost a drama— when the certainty of death is brought back into the equation, the movie is a poignant study of human beings dealing with, and anticipating grief.
‘I Dream Of Deluge’ off Songs for the End of the World is a tentative crescendo to this activity. It is a hymn for the living, a dirge for the dead– church pianos cutting through suspenseful rumbles and numerous voices vocalising non-descript words about an eventuality. Whatever caused the end of the world isn’t the concern here, the music persists to guide you through the experience.
The Blotted: What kind of music do you listen to, on a day to day?
SIRA*: I am one of those people that when I get obsessed with a song I listen to it on a loop for 72 hours until I have extracted all the joy and emotion from it. But it’s not always like that. Let’s see though: taking a quick glance at my most played iTunes playlist you will find Gilberto Gil, Ashford and Simpson, a Brazilian group called Barbatuques, Sabrina Carpenter, Culture Club, Kid Fonque, Marvin Gaye, Eg and Alice, Thundercat, Raquel Rodriguez, Ben Folds Five, Goldfrapp, Tyler the Creator, Francis Bebey, Fuji Kaze, United Future Organisation, Fatai Rolling Dollar, Caetano Veloso, Tevin Campbell, Carl Orff, Oumou Sangare, Japanese ambient artist H Takahashi. An utterly mad mix from an outsider’s perspective perhaps. But feels normal to me.
The Blotted: Creating music that cuts across genres is always an interesting but dicey endeavour. The arrangement of the songs in this project is a personal standout. More than sonic prowess, arrangement is the secret sauce that separates good albums from great ones. I want to know, what were the factors that determined how you mixed the elements to sound so cohesive?
SIRA*: Thank you for such kind words. I just compose my music until it sounds and feels right. That is my process. Also I don’t really worry too much about genre so if I am mixing genres it doesn’t feel strange to me. I am more interested in harmony and chord progressions and the effect these sounds have on my physical and emotional body. The music I like sound the same: whether it’s Chopin or Ravel or James Taylor or Ivan Lins or Dori Caymmi, or Haitus Kaiyote or Thundercat or Earth Wind & Fire, the similarity between all these genres is the harmonies and chords. So it doesn’t matter that it’s country or funk or late romantic classical music. Those distinctions don’t matter to me. I just use what is available to me to express what I am feeling. And I shape my songs obsessively until they feel and sound like a balanced and healthy organism that lives, breathes and vibrates.
The Blotted: “Gbenebeka Rising” is a sprawling 13 minutes of direct encounter with Ogoni Culture, it seemed this sampled some choruses employed in worship of the goddess of the sky. What kind of research went into this and what informed your choice of these choruses?
SIRA*: So I would say that this is a worship song that has emerged from the soil. I am into the soil in a big way. Gbenebeka is said to be the founding mother of Ogoniland. And I am interested in the divine feminine and the ways it has been suppressed. My music aims to release it in some way. I think with “Gbenebeka Rising” I wanted to explore where our music comes from. So it starts with the sound of breath. Breath turns to wind in the track which in turn animates the birds, hence the birdsong. The oja flute imitates the birds. And it is the oja flute that summons the spirit. And that spirit is in the ground. As I said, I am interested in the soil. People think of spirituality as being about the sky or air. But we neglect soil which is a universe of its own. And it is through this soil that the spirit rises. The soil or earth spirits are represented by a low rumbling sound. And this rumble, this earth spirit, inspires the drums. Drums then connect to harmony. Drums aren’t tune-free, they’re pitched so to me the connection to a chorus of voices makes sense to me. And it is a joyful chorus. There is also thunder and rain. So I just move through these sounds, add to them, layer them, sing and play on top of them then build it all into something that I hope releases an energy. I write intuitively. The work already exists in its own realm. It is a complete and living vibrating entity. I am tapping into it and trying to give birth to it as a whole and healthy musical organism in the human realm.
The Blotted: While there is no direct mention of the effects of the oil boom that has defined the Niger Delta since independence, it might have been hinted at during Tyson Yunkaporta’s performance on Everybody Needs Salt. I want to understand what role that played in you putting together this piece, or is it just commentary on the times?
SIRA*: My music is a vibrational response to the decades-long effects of the disruption and pain caused by the industry to me on an interpersonal level. I don’t feel the need to textually address oil pollution in my music. The real lessons from this tragedy are deep and it’s going to take a lot art work to identify and untangle it all. Honestly, I don’t think writing a song about oil and politics is something I would ever do. It is much too on-the- nose and it also doesn’t necessarily inspire me. Also I have a weird take on oil. I think it occupies it’s own ontological universe. If geologists and paleontologists are to be believed, oil reserves are former dinosaurs. Oil is matter, of the earth and entirely natural. Oil has an identity outside of drilling, extraction and refining. It is not good or bad. It just is. We ascribe evil to it because that’s just what a certain set of humans have decided to do with this resource in their wisdom. So if I did do something directly about oil it would reflect my very strange take on it. I would write from the perspective of oil itself as a being. That appeals to me. I don’t really write protest songs. I work in the spirit and emotional realm to make change. I do root work. This kind of work is quieter than activism. But it also can be far more disruptive and radical over a longer period of time. That is where I live.
Listen to Sira*’s Songs for the End of the World
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