Vancouver musician Ruby Singh defies any easy genre classification

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From fungus symphonies to free-styling with fish and cross-cultural chorals, musician Ruby Singh keeps producing award-winning results across varied recorded releases.

With the new Celestial Libations, the Vancouver-based composer expands his scope into new sonic realms.

The album will have its premier on Nov. 21 and 22 at LOBE Studios, the high-tech immersive facility where Singh is also an artist in residence. A launch and listening party will take place for a limited audience on those dates. Tickets are available at lobestudio.ca.

Ruby Singh and the Future Ancestors album cover

His experimental vocal group Ruby Singh’s Vox Infold won Spiritual Artist of the Year at the 2025 Western Canadian Music Awards for its Vox.Infold II release. The album was also nominated in the Global Artist of the Year category.

Clearly, his work defies any easy genre classification.

“The win was a bit of surprise, as I didn’t think it was necessarily representative of that category,” he said. “But the work was intended to be about the journey of the spirit, so there you go. I’ve never shied away from being a person of spirit and believing in their being something greater than just what we see and hear.”

In 2024, Singh won in the Electronic/Dance Artist of the Year category for his Polyphonic Garden Suite II recording. This project definitely dived into the world we don’t hear using biosonification, synthesized renderings of electronic activity in flora, fauna and fungi, to create sounds. Mixed with field recordings, keyboards and the songs of animals ranging from wolves to orcas and more, the project reframed what world music can be.

On his latest recording, titled Celestial Libations, Singh and the group the Future Ancestors featuring Arthur Flowers offer up compositions that move through blues, gospel and others styles. Once again, attaining a greater consciousness through sound is a focus of the project in songs such as the philosophical Good God.

“I come from a long lineage of humans who have understood such things, as the origins of Sikhism talk about the interconnected, vibratory existence of the entire universe,” he said. “It seems like a natural extension to me. A lot of discussion around divinity went into this record.”

With a knack for bringing together talents from a wide range of musical disciplines to collaborate, Singh sometimes seems as much a project manager as musician on some of his recordings.

In many ways, the focus on Celestial Libations is on the contributions of 75 year-old American novelist, memoir author and performance poet Arthur Flowers. Juno-winning singer Khari Wendell McClelland of the Sojourners, singer Holly Eccleston, oud and guitar player Gordon Grdina, percussionist Kenton Loewen, DJ Paul Finlay and bassist Karlis Silins round out the lineup.

A modern griot, or storyteller, Flowers’ work is a showcase for the African-American experience as relayed through blues and spirituals, folk tales and storytelling. Singh has wanted to work with him since the two met at the Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver. It’s safe to say that Celestial Libations is a toast to Flowers as much as the Future Ancestors.

American performance poet Arthur Flowers. Photo by Caleigh Mayer

“Absolutely, and I have said that this could be titled Arthurs Flowers and the Future Ancestors featuring me instead,” said Singh. “I had originally had the idea of incorporating him into the project, but when he came in and mentioned all of the stories and things he hadn’t laid down from his life, I decided to make as much space as needed for him.

“This is a man who needs to be out in the world much more.”

The album plays out like a gospel of sorts, moving from the introductory In The Beginning on through adventures from meeting the Monkey Doctor to the final notes of the closing track Blessings. Even the traditional trickster character of Brer Rabbit turns up in Brer Rabbit and Sister Beetle.

Flowers’ telling of the story has nothing in common with the published versions compiled by white writers such as Robert Roosevelt, Joel Chandler Harris and others who adapted them for a very different audience. His take on the tale is far more connected to the storytelling traditions of enslaved peoples from West, Central, and Southern Africa.

Backed by sympathetic instrumentation that never overtakes Flowers’ gritty-voiced delivery, the effect is almost like having the best seat at a fireside story cycle from beginning to end.

“From the start, there was consensus about how the mythic journey would end because Arthur has been ending his shows with Blessings for years,” said Singh. “Essentially, he was blessing the record at the end which is beautiful.”

Along the way, the album veers into tougher territory such as Flowers observes on the powerful statement When the Hammer Falls. This piece posits the question of whether it has fallen or does it continue to come down.

“It definitely feels like we are in an age of hammers falling, from south of the border to across in Palestine and things like the wealth gap happening all over that means we are living in a time of oligarchs,” he said. “This is what I expect the moment when people build some sort of momentum to say they have had enough everywhere might sound like. A New Millennium is another look at that situation.”

Stressing that we should all appreciate what it means to live in a place where we can both witness and express outrage at the ills of the world, Singh says a lot of the writing he brought to the album was his own reflection on how hard it is to create anything when you have the world’s pain livestreamed into your homes on a constant basis.

That reflection created both the concept for Celestial Libation as well as a new collection of poetry by Singh titled Bladed Edge. The book and album are kind of a pair.

“Future Ancestors is outward and future-facing,” said Singh. “Bladed Edge is me looking at stories of migration and a dive into my own personal ancestry and past. How my ancestry got me here where I am and what we are facing as people to become future ancestors to others ties it all together.”

Ruby Singh and the Future Ancestors will be touring in support of Celestial Libations in 2026. For updates, visit rubysingh.ca.

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