Six Shooter is thrilled to welcome Zaki Ibrahim to the artist management roster. The enigmatic, highly acclaimed songwriter, now back in Toronto following the 2018 release of The Secret Life of Planets, defies simplifications of identity and genre along with other industry paradigms, which is to say she fits the Six Shooter artist profile perfectly. “The first time I saw Zaki perform at Polaris several years ago blew me away. It was a performance I will never forget,” says Six Shooter Management President Helen Britton. “To have since met Zaki, connected with her and now to have ultimately signed such a rare talent is very exciting. She is a fantastic addition to our management roster, and I look forward to sharing all her upcoming plans with the world in the coming months.”

Ibrahim has upcoming headline shows and festival appearances in Canada, including at Toronto’s Great Hall this week. Overseas showcases, including at prestigious Le Printemps de Bourges festival in France, are planned for spring, where Ibrahim will be accompanied by Six Shooter Records’ new VP International Business Development, Allison Outhit.

Now booked by barrier-crushing trailblazer Tao-Ming Lau of Blue Crane, an agency that prioritizes underrepresented artists including women, LGBT and artists of colour, Ibrahim’s global tour history includes much of Europe, South Africa and North America, from Red Bull Studio Cape Town to Mongrel Media’s TIFF parties.

A nomad in both philosophical and logistical senses, Ibrahim’s extensive and varied network of collaborators, creatives and contributors has established a global presence primed to rise. "“I’m feeling courageous and positive about building my future career with Six Shooter," says Ibrahim. "I was able to get to know Helen, Shauna and the team and how they work before making the decision to sign on and I believe the timing and team are impeccable.”

TOUR DATES:
TORONTO, ON: The Great Hall, Feb 21 w/ DJ Bambii + Myst Milano
CALGARY, AB: Block Heater Festival, ATB Financial Stage (NMC), Feb 23

LISTEN
The Secret Life of Planets, 2018.
Orbit, Red Bull Music Studio Cape Town, 2016.

WATCH
CBC Music First Play Live, 2018.
“Do” Polaris Prize Gala performance, 2013.

READ
Anupa Mistry’s Pitchfork review of The Secret Life of Planets.
Helen Spitzer’s NUVO magazine profile.
Ben Rayner’s Toronto Star profile.

ABOUT ZAKI IBRAHIM:

There’s a standard narrative that an artist releases an album, but for Zaki Ibrahim it seems the reverse is true. From one angle, Ibrahim’s career is punctuated by extended absences from the Toronto scene where she built her name, launched a label and found success. From another vantage, for an artist who is known for her multiplicity of influences and identities, absence from one scene is in fact presence in another. The difference between departure and arrival is simply a matter of perspective. Ibrahim’s process, very much about immersion, connection and being there, wherever there may be, is a fundamental attribute of self and sound.

“I didn’t know I was gone,” begins Ibrahim in the trailer for The Secret Life of Planets, a spoken word treatise so poetic and cosmically disorienting that Ibrahim’s philosophy of elsewhere surfaces in the vapours, while the credits roll and you question your place in the universe. “I was gone,” she confirms, and then you realize the word nomad, which often appears in the context of trying to explain Ibrahim’s trajectory, describes something much deeper and truer about her helical path; it’s more a fingerprint than a figure of speech.

Throughout her career, from Vancouver to South Africa to Toronto and many points in between, Ibrahim has worked against the encroaching systems and machinery that would limit or dilute her vision. It’s impossible to imagine the future if you can’t escape the present. There, in the hypercurious process of transposing atomic-level details into big ideas and back again, songs emerge. Ibrahim’s work pushes back against binaries, against reductiveness, against the clenching muscles of expectation. “Planets isn’t just a product of black American or South African music styles; its multiple identities make it distinctly Canadian,” writes critic Anupa Mistry for Pitchfork. “It’s the work of an optimist whose voice wasn’t silenced by the confines of an unimaginative industry; it’s expansive in effort, and by sheer existence.”

Described as “a retro-Afrofuturist vision sending listeners on a journey through 40 years of electronic music,” (Nuvo) Ibrahim’s music brings elements of spoken word, hip hop, soul, house and 70s pop together, filtered through the prismatic and often contradictory lenses of personal, historical and scientific relativities. Even the concept of diaspora seems to fall short of capturing the vivid vibrational multitudes of Ibrahim’s scope, more than the sum of static geographic parts.

On stage, Ibrahim delivers theatrical, intricate configurations of bodies and ideas built on a contrast of sharp precision and untethered joy. Ibrahim aims to find space for spontaneity within the parameters of structure; in the same way that her music explores non-linear models of time and space, Ibrahim’s performances are designed with fluidity and recombination in mind.

ABOUT SIX SHOOTER MANAGEMENT:

For over two decades, Six Shooter Management has dedicated itself to artist development through core values of business acumen, uncompromising integrity and a focus on supporting sustainable, balanced careers for artists and their families. The sister company to Six Shooter Records, the management company is helmed by Helen Britton and includes managers and support staff in Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto.

The roster, which currently includes The Dead South, Whitehorse, Tanya Tagaq, Zaki Ibrahim, The Rheostatics, Ensign Broderick, The Jerry Cans and Riit is characterized by the creative excellence of its diverse and distinguished artists, each on their own unique paths to success and acclaim. With such a broad range of talent in the roster, Six Shooter Management also has extensive experience strategizing and navigating the entertainment world beyond music, from book publishing to theatre productions, documentary and museum projects and more.