Hi everyone, I’m back again this week to spotlight the composer and multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie!
Visionary artist and performer championing RADICAL change through mythic and afro-futuristic thinking, Ebizie creates alternative possibilities through music, often creating immersive, multimedia performances for multiple points of engagement from her audience. As a vocalist and dancer you will see her on stage, dressed somewhere between Sun-Ra and Bjork, journeying us through worlds through to consider the ‘what if’s?’.
Battle Cry opens the 2022 album The Swan, an instrumental interlude with the afro-jazz grooves of Fela Kuti. Perhaps an instruction on our listening, a call of self-situation to the listener, before the sonic journey they embark. I Seduce continues this earthly rhythmic world before extending possibilities into somewhere otherworldly through distortion and the sharp-edged, fast-paced vocalisations of Nwando, not dissimilar to Nicki Minaj’s Roman Zolanski persona. Contemporary jazz rhythms move the track into dance music with multidirectional vocal adlibs collaging across the track – we are thoroughly on another planet now.
Her practice draws on Black Atlantic ritual, electronic music, her own neurodiversity. She create works that are sonically undefinable, visually captivating and sensorily stimulating. Ebizie moves fluidly through sound combinations, across genres in a way that is playful, extremely crafted and completely engrossing.
I Birth the Moon, written for soprano and electronics performed by Juliet Fraser explores possibilities of cosmic other. We are challenged to listen to the possibilities of the human voice. Its qualities in the things we miss hearing every day are suddenly much more present, vibrant and perceptible. The electronics work to amplify the visceral and percussive elements of the vocal strains, scoffs, singing tones and moans; projecting Fraser’s voice across a space that seems infinitely expansive.
Her world-making begins on her website “Atelier Nwando” with a mission statement that defines this space as a commitment as a space for healing disabled, neurodivergent people from the global majority. Stepping out of your daily perceived realities, desensitized to the loudness and the nuance, Nwando Ebizie invites us to not just consider but experience a different way of being. The composer and multidisciplinary artist thinks across media, genre and space to curate works that guide us away from the assumed, toward questions and new
modes of being.
This artist’s collaborations with other artists create intensely alluring works such as Fall and then Rise on a Soft Winter’s Morning written with the London Sinfonietta. This work especially sought to engage with D/deaf audiences through use of balloons placed around the space and vibratory benches following research on D/deaf communities’ experiences of music. used as an electro-percussive instrument. Ebizie collaborated with BSL interpreter
and dancer Chisato Minamimura to translate the text of the piece into BSL as a starting point for the sonic composition. Ebizie, in futuristic metallic headdress performed as a vocalist, singing and reciting suggestions such as to share popcorn and engage in the space, guiding audience members through the performance and its many points of engagement.
Her curation of experiences through live events, collaborations with other disciplines and her own flexibility as a performer to lead by example of being and creating new spaces is thoroughly inspiring. Her ability to bend and craft herself into different personas such as ‘Lady Vendredi’, her blaxploitation heroine from a different dimension or the shimmering, pearl-adorned performer for The Swan pulls us into her world of ‘crossroads’. Ebizie’s remaking of herself through sound, fashion and engaging with her audience, moving through the space and providing multiple aspects of stimulation pulls you into her world of
‘crossroads’ – possibilities.
Pioneering artist whose work is reshaping what music artists could or perhaps should be doing on stage, consider embracing her world. Follow her work on her website www.nwandoebizie.com and Instagram @nwando_ebizie.
Listen to her music on our Weekly Playlist on Spotify and check out the other artists we’ve been listening to!
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