British-Nigerian visual artist Sirah* shares electrifying single + video “Good Thing”

Today, British-Nigerian musician, filmmaker, and visual artist SIRA* (Zina Saro-Wiwa) shared her pulsing new single + video, “Good Thing.” It’s the latest taste off her debut album Songs for the End of the World, out October 4. The track’s pounding, electrifying beat roils with raw energy and begins with an innocent, rural African beat layered over spoken word before melting into an infectious thrash-pop anthem with several surprising rhythmic currents.

Written and recorded in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, “Good Thing” is partly sung in SIRA*’s traditional Ogoni language and features singing from members of her household in Nigeria. Lo-fi, laid back, infectious and fun, it bears, however, a loaded and heavy message. The track is made up from layers of several traditional percussion instruments that SIRA* bought in Ogoniland, all performed by herself throughout the track. Connecting the African village with international beats, the track culminates into a charged spiritual calling to heed your own inner voice in a time where the so-called “narcissytem” prevails. The phrase “Lenu Naa Bor Yor Me Ep” repeats throughout the song – an Ogoni saying that means, “When you see a good thing you don’t need a second opinion. When you know you know.”

Zina expands, “This is a track about cultivating your inner truth, inner voice and instinct. It fits into this apocalypse theme because in a time of ever more information and disinformation, proselytizing podcast bros, TikTok historians, AI, moral relativism and ever-speedy news cycles, the confusion is real and deeply unsettling. Our relationship with truth is severely compromised. I think we will have to find ways to discover our inner voice – which is not easy at the best of times – to navigate the complexity. But it is a practice. Cultivating your inner voice is a vital tool in your apocalypse kit.”

Zina will also be participating in this year’s Atlanta Art Week with the installation the end is near, the end is beginning from October 4-6. This special presentation is programmed at the Goat Farm Arts Center’s SITE. The installation is a compilation of presentations of video art by women artists of African descent. Visually and sonically immersive, haunting and spiritual, the films will be projected onto the ruins of a 19th-century industrial complex and feature reflections on death and rebirth, endings and beginnings, collapse and revolution. During the installation, Zina will debut several new works from her upcoming new album, including her first endeavor in animation. More info on the event here.

SIRA* wants to talk about the apocalypse. She’s prepared to tackle the weight of such a controversial topic, because she’s already spent so much time doing it. SIRA*’s upcoming debut album Songs for the End of the World is a carefully curated collection of tracks that serve as an outlet for these emotions towards the apocalypse. The collection of songs act as a toolkit for the apocalypse – how to survive and thrive in the hardest of times. SIRA*’s sound could be compared to that of early Björk, or if Fleet Foxes were born in Africa, or the Brazilian supergroup Fourth World, or an Afro-Brazilian Massive Attack. It’s safe to say that her music surpases all genres and sounds, fitting right into its own eclectic category. Composed, arranged and sung entirely by SIRA*, the album also features heavyweight musicians such as Mark de Clive-Lowe and it includes a contribution from the superstar Australian aboriginal writer and academic Tyson Yunkaporta. The album also contains remixed field recordings from her art making in Ogoniland from the last 11 years. The timing for this album couldn’t be better. SIRA* is the musical alter-ego of visual artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa and is a proud member of the Ogoni, indigenous people of the Niger Delta region. Her father was Ken Saro-Wiwa, a writer and human rights activist executed by the Nigerian military government in 1995 for leading peaceful protests against Shell Oil and its environmental and economic denigration of Ogoniland.

“My art life has been a way of taking hold of that legacy and transforming the pain into something powerful and beautiful,” she says. “But I’ve been singing and composing since the age of four. And whilst art has been good for trying to manage the psychological and political fallout from my father’s death, music is actively healing my heart in a deeper way. It is a return to my truest self. The lynch pin to all my creative outputs.” 

Though born in Nigeria, SIRA* was brought up in the UK and during this time, drew inspiration from Impressionist composers including Satie, Chopin and Ravel. She has sung in choirs throughout her youth. Her style evolved rapidly after she became obsessed with Brazilian music and she traveled to Bahia in Brazil multiple times by herself from the tender age of 19. She wrote for legendary underground music magazine Straight No Chaser and was immersed in world music, jazz and the underground electronic scene in the mid-to-late 90s. In 2009, she relocated to New York City from London and began her art practice, eventually moving out to Los Angeles before her recent decision to return to Port Harcourt, Nigeria and purchase a farm. Songs for the End of the World channels elements from all these places, but SIRA* also draws on energy from beyond our material plane. SIRA* speaks enthusiastically of animist traditions and unseen “little people” in different cultures, including the Kachina spirits of Hopi folklore. “I live in a liminal space, with one foot in the spiritual world.”

Outside of her blooming music career, SIRA* is a revered artist. Her multi-disciplinary, research-based practice deals primarily with environmentalism, invisible ecologies, re-imagining indigeneity and exploring the nature of power. She works with video, photography, sound, distillation, food, performance lecture and institution-building to tell stories and share research and meditation findings. SIRA* is a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Art and a TORCH visiting Fellow at Oxford University and her art works are collected in museums including MoMA and The Smithsonian. She has lectured on her practice and ideas at Yale, UCLA, Oxford University amongst many other institutions.