In June 2020, Ibrahim embarked on a project to reconfigure and rerelease her genre and continent-spanning catalogue. As an opportunity to reflect on intention and outcome and as a conversation with past selves, the reissue experience is as much a process of recovery as discovery. As part of this journey, Ibrahim reconnected with Reza + Ty, the hosts of scene-shaping Toronto radio show O.T.A. Live, to revisit these times and places. In this new interview, Ibrahim discusses her journey, which spans the west coast, South Africa and Toronto. Ibrahim also paints a picture of her musical influences, her own creative process, and the community of artists and collaborators that helped shape her sound. WATCH HERE.

Explore the Iqra Box, the first in a series of wellness box collections curated by Ibrahim and showcasing Black creators, Black-owned businesses and wellness providers. The Iqra box contains objects, experiences and art that informed and inspired the Shö (Iqra in Orange) era, and includes a Reiki workshop, incense, a copy of bell hooks’ All About Love and more. Learn more and enter to win HERE.

Stream Eclectica (Episodes in Purple) and Orbit: A Post-Coital Prequel on all platforms worldwide.

ABOUT ZAKI IBRAHIM

There’s a standard narrative that an artist releases an album, but for Zaki Ibrahim it seems the reverse is true. 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.

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. 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.”

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. 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.