‘Stewart Kendrick & Ni Singh, Origin Unknown (Offsite 9 Aftershow Party’. Image by Dee Patel

ECLECTICISM – Ni Singh

In this podcast I talk to the multitalented artist and cultural misfit Ni Singh using ‘eclecticism’ as a starting point.

“We journey from London, Wolverhampton Polytechnic and Guyana encountering Arabic strings, Egyptian percussion and the gilbaka fish.” Bobby Tiwana

Extracts from the podcast

“That's my journey that how it starts with me. But to where I am with Offsite 9 that's a journey, but that journey for me is shaped by a lot of things. It’s shaped by my childhood and tragedy as well as the bleeding hilarious and downright surreal.”
“But it didn't end there because what happened to me, was samplers and electronic music were just starting to like, really impact on how musicians started to pick up. Synthesizers were there from the seventies really actually. But samplers, you’re talking eighties and onwards and you're talking [about] the ability to loop and that notion of dance music and house and those things. So, whilst I started in guitar bands, I suddenly thought wow there’s this real electronic sound here, it’s a different sonic-ness than live musicians. So, I started really getting into like dance and that kind of genre.”
“So, people who don't know Wolves, the trolley you're talking about there was 6 doughnuts for a pound, of course with, with inflation that that's still £1, but now you get three doughnuts and that's the, that's the tragedy of life because life gets more expensive as you get old.”
“I love my fish because Guyana’s below sea level so we have a lot of fish and it’s Amazon Basin, so we had we had crazy fish. But I got put off by fish in the UK because all I could find at one point was cod and haddock and kippers and whilst I love those, I couldn't find, like a fish that is called the gilbaka which is related to the piranha which we eat, which is gorge…”
“It makes, you create a friendship, a sense of friendship because you have to make connections really quite quickly so that's what it did for me. I’m still quite an open book and I'm quite transparent. I like to think that anyway. On the flip side though, it meant that you said goodbye to a lot of people than you would. And when your younger it didn't really matter so much, actually because when you’re 10, 11, 12, when I moved in quick succession, 13, you don't really say ‘hey here’s my email’. And there's no, you just kind of tend to go ‘see you, were off again’. So much I suppose like military family’s kind of that way really. It created a way of me seeing, not fitting into anyone, anyone group of people because I was always moving. So even at University I didn’t fit with either the Caribbean society, the Sikh society, which I knew there was an Asian part of me but I'm not Sikh, there’s a Caribbean part to me but I'm not, I wasn’t born in Jamaica. There’s a Brit part of me. So I would, I would I would fly just above, always really and that's what my, that's what happened to me and that's a direct consequence of that kind of upbringing really.”

Download the transcript of the podcast here.

Togetherness Credits

Artist Ni Singh
Presented and produced by Bobby Tiwana
Sound design, engineering and editing by Duncan Grimley
Transcription Sanjit Basra
Commissioned by Creative Black Country
Funded by Arts Council England
Supported by Wolverhampton Arts & Culture and Paycare.

9 Words Podcasts: Eclecticism

Download the transcript of the podcast here.

Contact us on 0121 525 1127 or email info@creativeblackcountry.co.uk