Rully Shabara

Your Voice Is Your Sound

“I’m interested in those who use voice as a tool to discover more about themselves.”

Indonesian musician Rully Shabara’s main interest as an artist and vocalist lies in exploring the human voice as a medium of creation, and human languages as material for experimentation. A boundary-pushing, genre-bending musician, Shabara has initiated many concept-driven projects centered on the voice’s malleability. This includes, for instance, navigating vocal range, textures, and spirituality in his collaborative project Senyawa (with Wukir Suryadi), or developing the ongoing language-driven band project Zoo. He has worked with notable international musicians and artists such as Keiji Haino, Stephen O‘Malley, Otomo Yoshihide, Rabih Beaini, Damo Suzuki, Bob Ostertag, Yoshida Tatsuya, and many more.

Cari_Padu_Public_Perfromance
Cari Padu public perfromance. Photo: Wandirana
SENYAWA
Senyawa. Photo: Gigi Priadji
Rully Shabara: Zoo
Zoo. Photo: ©Camille Blake

Shabara has given workshops around the world, focusing on using the human voice as a rich resource to explore primal expression and improvisation. He has also composed music for film, theater, and dance performances. In addition to his musical work, Shabara also writes short stories and screenplays, and has cofounded a film production company dedicated to documenting live music.

The Book of Khawagaka

“Voice can be a gateway to find one’s true sound,” he says. As a mentor he is seeking applicants who are interested in experimenting with how voice and language can be developed into challenging, explorative, and relevant ideas. “I am interested in working with candidates who share the same interest, those who seek depth and are open to the wildest experiments; who are not afraid of embracing ugliness and harshness, or the darkness of reality as well as the beauty of it. I am interested in those who use voice as a tool to discover more about themselves, and what matters to them.”

Rully Shabara’s Raung Jagat. Photo: Swandi Ranadila

Creative practitioners are encouraged to apply with any type of project that investigates the relationship between the human voice and language in an interesting and meaningful manner. This could be acoustic, electronic, performative, or even conceptual. “I will provide all my knowledge and share my techniques, from writing to sound-making,“ Shabara says.

www.rullyshabara.id

Watch the video statement to find out more about what Shabara is looking for in applications:

Nominees

Peny Chan

Revisit and Reinterpret the Peking Opera

Polyglot Malaysian singer and performer Peny Chan seeks to highlight the cultural traditions as well as the transformations within the Peking opera’s style of singing. Her project proposal aims to deconstruct the opera’s original structure and reconstruct it into a new experimental genre of singing. Chan will use south-east Asian languages and dialects to read and sing traditional Chinese opera librettos, and push the envelope on the accepted sounds within it. Her goal is not to undo but rather to innovate the genre’s historic conventions, in order to carve out space for contemporary impulses.

Agustina Crespo

Babel

Argentinian vocalist, composer, and conductor Agustina Crespo’s project encompasses a multidisciplinary piece for a vocal ensemble. The work, Babel, deals with the study of the instrumental possibilities of the voice outside of semantics, thus expanding to other means of communication and a diversity of artistic languages in pursuit of a common reflection. Crespo uses the myth of the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for the lack of communication in our contemporary society to probe whether music, sound, and timber can be as powerful and impactful as semantics in conveying meaning.

Pratyay Raha

The Liminal Sense

Composer, voice artist, and poet Pratyay Raha's project proposal is a sonic exploration into notions such as Otherness, marginality, boundary, and the body in the Indigenous-culture spaces of West Bengal. How and why do these spaces come to represent the Other? Using his voice, electronics, as well as sonic and visual field recordings, Raha seeks to investigate the role of the human voice in Indigenous traditions. The Liminal Sense will meld different dialects, movements, music, sound, text, and poetry to reimagine a space and time which was once brimming with creative impulses and rich heritage, and is now on the verge of extinction.

Mentee

鳳殞 (Sorrow of the Phoenix)

Peny Chan

Mentors Edition 7

Daliso Chaponda

Daliso Chaponda

Humor and Storytelling

Alia Ibrahim

A Dance with Reality

Florentina Holzinger

Bodies in Action

Laura Huertas Millán

Reworlding Stories

Ana Prvački

Ana Prvački

Slapstick and Seduction

Rully Shabara

Rully Shabara

Your Voice Is Your Sound